


Hell to Pay

by leoandlancer



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Battle Couple, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, In Which Hanzo went to Blackwatch with Genji, Jesse "Ride or Die for my Aesthetic" McCree, M/M, McCree took over Deadlock, McHanzo - Freeform, On the Run, Pining, Trains, Violence, everyone gets a cozy plaid shirt because I make the rules
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-04-13 18:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14118225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandlancer/pseuds/leoandlancer
Summary: Fifteen years after the fall of overwatch, Blackwatch is still a powerful, secret organization running on the wealth of the fallen Shimada Clan. When their existence is dragged into the public eye, it throws Gabriel Reyes and his two lieutenants, Hanzo and Genji, into the path of those who have been seeking them.Barely managing to regroup, the Blackwatch survivors realize the safest place they could be is with their elusive enemies, the infamous Deadlock Gang. The Bandit King of Deadlock, Jesse McCree, agrees to make them disappear without hesitation. Within an hour of bargaining, a valuable cache of information for Deadlock's protection, Hanzo, Genji, and Reyes find themselves whisked away into the secret escapes Jesse McCree has built over his entire career.However, it turns out Jesse McCree has his own agenda while he works with his second in command and best friend, Fareeha Amari. Hanzo decides to help them and discovers that while the outlaw isn't bad company, he's one hell of a risky distraction.





	1. Delegation is key to Effective Leadership

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2018 McHanzo Big Bang.  
> My Partner is [The Archivist](http://hellomynameisandiam.tumblr.com/), they're on Tumblr please go check them out! Their illustrations will appear in the story. [Windlion](http://windlion.tumblr.com/)provided a beta reading that has saved my sanity.  
> I hope you enjoy!  
> Edit: I'm a SAVANT when it comes to formatting and did not correctly load Archivists art. ₍₍ (ง Ŏ౪Ŏ)ว ⁾⁾ Sorry about that!!!!  
> Edit: Fic has been overhauled, but the changes are taking so much time that I've removed it so I can edit it properly and I'll be reuploading it as I go. I'm really sorry to have removed it, but knowing how much I had to adjust things was making me really exasperated and anxious. I apologize. Also I'll be able to actually get a proper link up to Archivist art this time orz

The cold metal floor shook and rattled under Hanzo, and he swayed and braced himself against a crate strapped to one wall. Reyes crouched by him, cursing under his breath as he grimly worked with a first aid kit the size and weight of a baked potato. Blood pooled and ran as the floor tipped below them.

Genji lay between them, Hanzo with one hand on his brother and the other holding the flashlight for Reyes as he stapled the deep gash in Genji’s stomach closed.

Genji was taking it well, all things considered, being just barely this side of conscious and not wishing to push his luck. He was very, very pale under his green hair. He was turning cold under Hanzo's hand.

The three of them were a pathetic little group, crouched in the cold of a hastily procured courier’s transport in a tiny circle of light and widening pool of blood.

 

 

"Tell me again," Hanzo growled. He was holding Genji's wound closed one-handed, blood making his grip slick and the task of keeping his brother's skin whole a difficult one. "Tell me again, Reyes, why we can't go to one of the safe houses?"

"Compromised," Reyes snarled. He was still bleeding from the nose and mouth and had been since he'd found Hanzo. The nose wasn't broken, and the inside of his mouth had stopped bleeding by the time they'd found Genji. "If you want to risk hitting the place on Argyle, or even the one above Paper Chase I will say it’s been a privilege and an honor, wish you all the best in your future endeavors and bid you fare-thee-fucking-well."

Hanzo scowled at his boss. "You don't know they're compromised."

"I know more than I've told you, ingrate," Reyes said, with no malice in him as he began unrolling the two pill-bottle sized rolls of bandages from the kit. He studied them in disgust, then folded them into pads and laid them over the gash. "You're welcome to check them. But Genji being attacked in broad daylight on a crowded street and me waking up to find someone in my house doesn't bolster confidence."

"Someone was in your home?" Hanzo managed to tear his eyes off his brother for the first time since they'd recovered him, and looked his commander full in the face. " _Your_ home?"

"You have a home?" Genji had been covering his mouth with one hand, a childish habit he couldn't shake at times like this. For once Hanzo didn't care.

"What? You expect I lived in the shadows? Hung by my feet from the rafters above the depot?" Reyes hissed, glaring into nearly useless first aid kit and dropping it aside in disgust. "You should know better, there's a difference between public opinion and truth."

"Sure," Genji let that slide easily. "The uneducated public will believe anything if they watch a man vanishing into a ghostly black fart on youtube three million times. I just thought you curled up in a little nest of shredded paper and old mission reports and empty coffee cups under your desk."

"I'm not sure why you--" Reyes stood, one hand braced on his knee to steady himself against the sway and acceleration of the truck. A newspaper slid audibly across the floor, and Genji piped up again.

"I mean I've not seen you on a mission in so long, I can't picture you away from your desk and--" Genji went on, managing to make a deathbed whisper into a jibe that made Reyes huff in sheer exasperation.

"Listen here, punk," Reyes started again.

"He needs healing," Hanzo snapped. It was a familiar state of affairs.

Reyes turned away with a shrug and crossed to open the driver’s toolkit strapped securely in one corner of the box. He came out with a roll of duct tape at least five years old and turned back to his two lieutenants, balancing like a seasoned mariner in the dark box of the swaying cab as the courier took the ramp onto the highway and accelerated.

"I noticed, Hanzo, shame there's nothing wrong with his damn lip though." Reyes yanked a strip of duct tape off the roll with a sound like god's own cat clawing its way down a divine curtain. He bit the strip at the roll and neatly tore it away.

"We need to lie low," Hanzo went on.

"I agree," Reyes taped the gauze bandages to Genji's stomach, his voice as low and rough as ever, spoken as though through a perpetual snarl, but his hands were careful on his lieutenant's wound. "Or find Moira. Wherever the hell she went."

Genji pressed his hand to his mouth, his eyes gone glassy in pain and blood loss, but he didn't make a sound.

"So where are we going?" Hanzo pressed.

"I have nowhere in mind." Reyes tore another strip up from the roll of tape. Bit it, tore it off, laid that strip over the other side of Genji's bandages. The blood was coming through the thin gauze, but slower now, sluggish between the staples and the pressure and Genji's failing blood pressure.

Genji was sweating and cold, and he tipped his head back weakly until it rested against Hanzo's knee.

Reyes put his hands on either side of Genji's wound, keeping pressure and watching the blood as it seeped up through the gauze. Hanzo took the open hand his brother held weakly up to him instead. Genji was trembling, and Hanzo held on with the strength Genji didn't have right now and hoped he felt as steady as he always should. They were quiet, and very still in the small, cold light of the little torch.

"Did you just say you've got no contingency to this?" Genji said, as conversationally as a man at death's door could sound.

"I did, yes," Reyes said calmly. "I have absolutely, no goddamn idea what to do about... this."

He made the word speak for all of it. For the whole day that had ripped the order of their lives down around them, thrown them like toys into the bloody maw of a world that had suddenly awoken to their existence. A world that hated them.

"You owe me twenty," Genji said to Hanzo, breaking through his thoughts.

"I hate you," Hanzo said flatly, his mind yanked out of the typhoon of his own thoughts and back to five years ago when Genji and he had made a little bet on the seeming omnipotence of their commander.

Genji didn't have the breath to snort, but Hanzo knew he'd tried.

"Anyway I don't accept the bet," Hanzo clicked off the flashlight, plunging them into darkness that was far easier to accept than the horrible crushing chaos of the world around him. Easier to see nothing then his brother's blood spreading over the metal of the transport's floor. "Reyes, you're our commander. You have to have a contingency."

Reyes grunted in the dark and fell silent again.

Hanzo let him keep the silence, and Genji lay still, the strength of his grip on Hanzo's hand failing slowly.

“We're under your authority," Hanzo said quietly. "Will we die under it?"

Genji' shallow breathing hitched briefly. Reyes sighed.

"You could have died on any mission I sent you on, Hanzo." Reyes said into the dark. Something about the dark, their training, or the disaster of a day that they'd lived through encouraged them to talk quietly, barely audible over the noise of the truck's engine.

"I accepted those risks. I do not accept this," Hanzo hoped he didn't sound as petulant as he felt. Fear was making him angry.

"Hanzo, I found someone _in my own home_ ," Reyes growled.

In the dark, Hanzo started. The anger in the statement was like a physical blow, not aimed at him, but the anger couldn't have been clearer if Reyes had slammed his fist into the crate beside him for emphasis.

"Nothing I have planned, nowhere I could go, no place I'd think of as safe, none of it, none of my plans or schemes or bolt holes, none of my carefully made and maintained exit strategies are going to work. Someone got into my house, in past the dogs and traps and the passwords, someone unlocked my front door and waited for me where I sleep. Waited for me to wake up. They know me. They aren't going to let me slip you two fake passports and an envelope of money so we can meet up in a few weeks in Monaco with a fake name and some new facial hair."

"Always wanted a mustache," Genji murmured.

"You'd be striking," Hanzo assured his idiotic, half dead brother in a deadpan before he could stop himself. "Reyes," he managed to drag his attention to the disaster at hand. Then his mind stuttered out, all his thoughts and attention dragged back to his brother dying right here under his hands.

"Reyes, who got to you?" Genji asked the question instead.

That question hadn't occurred to Hanzo, and it was a valuable one. It was something Hanzo should have thought of if his brother wasn't nearly dead and he was paying attention. Anyone who could get into Reye's house was a threat they should have known about, should have been tracking before now.

"He's..." Reyes trailed off.

For the first time in Hanzo's memory, his commander declined to impart potentially life-saving information.

"And how did you get out?" Genji went on.

Hanzo blinked in the dark. Another good question, another strange thing in this day of strange things. Reyes had been bleeding from the nose and a split lip, but it hadn't been bad; he would have gotten worse from taking a tennis ball to the face.

"I am capable of ambulating my own goddamn self out of trouble, you little shit," Reyes replied. "Even when I'm not a ghostly black fart as you so sweetly call me."

"Who'd bother to break into your place," Genji said, top tier rationality from a dying man. "Then just tap you on the nose and let you _ambulate_ out? Fart or no fart. You didn't kill him, we wouldn't be working around this guy if you just killed him."

Hanzo briefly wished he could see Reyes' face, then remembered it wouldn't do him any good. Reyes was the best liar Hanzo had ever met.

"Killed him, no," Reyes said the words like the thought hadn't occurred to him. "He turned up alive, he's not dead."

Genji and Hanzo gave this stunningly logical statement a polite moment of silence. Reyes made no sound.

"Most people who don't die and aren't killed, I mean," said Genji, master of critical thinking, "Yeah, people who are alive are not dead. You nailed it."

"I'm demoting you," Reyes replied, some of his old asperity back in his voice. "In fact, you're both fired."

Hanzo snorted. "From what? Does Blackwatch even exist anymore?"

The truck rounded a curve in the highway, moving fast, and the transport swayed. Genji made a small noise as the equilibrium of pain inside him was disturbed. Hanzo and Reyes leaned into the force of the turn to steady themselves and a beaten up newspaper slid back to its corner of the transport.

"I think you'll find that the clear fact that Blackwatch does exist is the problem," Reyes said. "We talked about this."

"No no," Genji was whispering, trying to talk and gain control over his own pain at once. "No, its existence wasn't the problem. We were functioning just fine with its continued existence. I think you'll both find that the trouble started when people found out we still existed."

"They liked us just fine in the old days," Reyes growled. "Goddamn, I miss the Omnic Crisis."

"You just enjoyed hiding in Overwatch's shadow," Genji said unsympathetically. Back then, he had been a teenager with good money and terrible judgment with a view of worldly events so narrow it could have balanced on the edge of his sword.

Instead of telling Genji to shut up, or argue the point, or even snarl out something damning about Genji's ignorance of the topic, Reyes just grunted.

"The crisis ended over ten years ago." Hanzo dragged the focus out of the inglorious days of Blackwatch's unchecked reign before Overwatch's public and incredibly humiliating fall. "Reyes, we're in a courier truck, my brother is half dead, and I know you didn't keep Blackwatch running all this time just to fall like this."

"Too many damn fronts," Reyes muttered. "Too many damn things to guard against and I didn't see."

"You’re alright, right?," Genji asked Hanzo, politely giving Reyes a minute to himself.

"I'm," Hanzo started, then stopped. He wasn't hurt. At least not physically. "No, I'm fine."

His second language wasn't adequate to express what he was at the moment. Fine wasn't it, just a convenient word to use in place of a real one.

"Problem with the exposure is everything I could normally do to erase it is being watched, guarded against. If I move in any way I have planned, anyway that I want to, I'm going to be caught, trapped at it." Reyes huffed a sigh in the dark.

Hanzo could almost pinpoint where the newspaper was in the dark, he was so aware of the disastrous effect it had had. He could almost still hear it screaming up at him,   _BLACKWATCH BACK FROM THE GRAVE_. Hanzo had seen it and nearly screamed back. A thick, special edition paper-and-ink publication edition of today's news. There was a shiny colour picture on the front, a big headline, this was the biggest news since the fall of Overwatch.

"Fortunately you have me and Hanzo here. Who had the presence of mind to decant you into a courier truck like you’re lost luggage."Genji almost laughed with breath he couldn't spare.

"The truck was a remarkable show of brains," Hanzo said, "for you."

"Hanzo," Reyes said, and this was the voice of his commander again, the low growl in the dark that had directed Hanzo into and out of ten years worth of infiltrations and assassinations and every kind of mission Hanzo could have never believed in.

"Reyes?"

"Take command," Reyes said.

It was the most unexpected thing Reyes had ever said in the course of their long association.

"Reyes--" Hanzo tried to ignore his brother, curled against his bent knees like a child, laughing with no breath.

"Your brother's right, I don't want to be in a goddamn truck being moved like cheap produce, so I know that's not something my assassin's going to be looking for. We need to disappear, Hanzo, we need to vanish. You tell me how you'll do that. You tell me how you're going to get your brother and I out of this."

"Reyes," Hanzo said once more. His voice had been dropping an octave at each iteration, and now he shut his eyes in exasperation. "You're our commanding..."

"Hanzo," Genji was smiling, Hanzo could hear it in his brother's voice. "Hanzo, you've been hunting a vanishing act for two damn years. How do they do it?"

"Deadlock Gang's methods are not an open book to me," Hanzo replied crisply. "Two years I’ve been hunting Deadlock and I only _just_ found--."

"Hanzo," Reyes said. "I can't act without getting caught. The man who can walk into my house will know what I'm going to do, I promise you. If I give an order, it's going to be anticipated, and stopped. Give me something else. Give me some other way to keep from falling."

Hanzo's mind turned uneasily. He wasn't a commander anymore. He'd been trained, groomed, shaped from an early age to be a general, but that had only been because the elders of his clan had wanted a figurehead to lead.

He was unaccustomed to thoughts like this, unaccustomed to the ideas that were spinning through his mind now.

"Save us, brother," Genji said, an amateur's dramatic fake sob in his voice, "Save me."

"Shut up," Hanzo squeezed his hand in the dark. "Reyes," he went on slowly, talking as flatly as he could manage. "You're going to hate this idea.”


	2. Cats Were the First Judges

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, in a much less polished form, was originally published as part of the McHanzo Big Bang on March 28, 2018. However, there were so many things I wasn't able to fix before posting I've taken the fic down and am now refitting it as I've been wanting to.  
> I hope you enjoy it.

Rain sluiced down the old tiles of the train station roof. It fell so heavily, so thoroughly, the water had formed lakes over the hard clogged drains and white water in the little creek. It was raining hard enough that when the drops struck down, they shattered and bounced back up, and anyone out there was going to catch rain coming and going. Anyone out there was a damn idiot, McCree amended to himself; he could barely see the overgrown trees on the other side of the tracks out the window except as a dark green wall.

The waiting room of the train station had been cleared decades ago when this station, and its entire train line, had been abandoned. It wasn't a large room, bright white and airy with skylights on the south side and a wide waiting area outside under the spreading roof. McCree liked the old abandoned station. There was still a little kitchen for making refreshments for the waiting passengers, and an old clock hung from chains in the ceiling.

Water dropped into the half-full bucket McCree had put under one of the leaky sections of roof fifteen minutes ago. His day had been ordered by that bucket. Emptying it every half hour had been his way of measuring time, his way of knowing that time was passing at all. There was a steady _plink-plink-plink_ that McCree was so familiar with he could probably set music to it.

"McCree?"

McCree looked back at the station master’s door and found his honorary little sister leaning on the door jam and braiding a chunk hair by her ear. "Lieutenant?"

"Well, that answered my question." She yawned at him in a gratifying display of disrespect. "You'd be in a better mood if you'd caught whatever the hell you came out here hunting."

"I ain't huntin," McCree said, unsure exactly what he was doing anymore.

"Well whatever it is, are you just about finished?" She tied her braid off, flicked it over her shoulder, pushed off from the door and stood squarely facing him with her arms crossed.

McCree huffed out a sigh, looked back at the pail of water and listened a little longer to the bell-like _plink-plink-plink_ above the noise of the rain tearing down outside.

"McCree," her voice was neutral, neither sympathetic or challenging. She didn't even sound currious when she went on, "You haven't moved for three days. You've barely stirred yourself to work.  If something doesn't happen to you, you're going to take root. What the hell are you doing?"

"Reeha, I don't know how to explain what I think I am doing," McCree said carefully, reminding himself that it was perfectly true. He leaned back against the table under the wide windows, hands resting easy on its edge by his hips, and crossed his ankles. His eyes were drawn naturally to the only thing moving in the waiting room, the splash and ripple of the rainwater in the bucket was fascinating in a sleepy kind of way. "But I'm taking a little more time for it."

His lieutenant nodded, unruffled. "I'm working on the closing order for Roanapur. You made up your mind if you want to fill the entirety?"

McCree's mood, if possible, soured. "What all are you wondering about?"

Without hesitating, Reeha rattled off the list. Most of it was military grade, some experimental. All of it would have been enough to arm both sides of a relatively ambitious border dispute with aspirations of all out land war.

The sound of the water dripping into the bucket changed, and McCree pushed himself off from the table and took the full bucket up by its rope handle.

"We've got a monopoly on the supply of most of that. Sell them anything we don't control cheap, tell them we'll go out of our way to fill the order. Tell them we’ll sell more in a month. We can lie that long. Stagger deliveries and see if you can get a tip to someone who wants them arrested."

"Anything in particular?" Reeha was making a note of all this as he spoke.

McCree reached the open door, hurled the bucket of rainwater out into the storm to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends, looked up and froze.

"McCree?"

"Use your best judgement, tempered by experience."

Reeha saluted left-handed with her mouth open in another yawn. She turned  back to the station master’s office, already losing interest. McCree was still staring out into the rain, listening to the _tat-tat-tat_ of water dripping onto the hardwood floor behind him.

Three... No, four figures were fording their way through the rain down the railway tracks. His spotters in dark grey and blue rain gear, and someone barely visible in white and grey held between them. McCree deliberately took a step back inside, then backed to where the water was dripping onto the hardwood, all without taking his eyes off the approaching party. He set the bucket down on the wet spot and listened as it began to fill again.

Time passed. McCree listened to the water drip down, paced briefly around the room, and double checked that the paperwork he had spread over his work tables under the platform windows was fit to be seen by strangers.

"You about to lay out a welcome mat, too?"

Reeha was leaning back in a cane bottom chair so only its hind legs were on the floor, staring through the open door at him with an incredulous grin on her face.

"Thank you no, Lieutenant. Go to hell," McCree politely shut the door between his waiting room and her office.

When he looked again, it was certainly four people coming through the rain. McCree took a moment to breathe. It could be anyone. It could be nothing.

"Boss."

McCree was staring at a ciphered supply lists pinned to the wall when the little group came through the door. He turned, found one of his spotters standing looking half drowned with rainwater dripping off him and holding a bow and a quiver of arrows unlike any McCree had ever seen. Two more spotters stood behind him, dripping water on the old hardwood. They were holding someone between them.

"Afternoon," McCree said, keeping his voice even by a force of will that was nearly painful. He checked his stance, his posture, his hands for tension, and assumed a carefully practiced nonchalant stance.

The new arrival stood quietly between the two spotters in the back. He wore white and grey, his left arm covered from shoulder to palm. He was wearing armor.

McCree stared. Three days he'd been out here, three days of waiting and wondering, three days of only infrequent stops by Adamant to pick up orders for supplies and invoices for customers. Three days of bathing in the lake below the hill, of cooking their meals over a fire, having no electricity or heat, sleeping rough under the ticket seller's desk with a wool blanket. In that time, McCree had seen no one but the six people he'd assigned to stay here.  In all that time, they had seen no other person, seen no fires but those they set, heard no voices but their own.

Goddamn, McCree thought in the startled silence of his own mind, I was right.  

"Caught him in the rough cut, heading right for here," The lead spotter scraped water out of his beard as he spoke. He was a man who had utterly given up on shaving in the complete absence of hot water. "Didn't put up any kind of fight, didn't say anything, can't speak a lick of English..."

The stranger was bent forwards slightly, head down and dark hair trailing over his shoulder in a loose ponytail. He kept so still, McCree knew he must have been trained for it; stealth certainly, assassination probably. His hands were cuffed behind him but the set of his shoulders was relaxed.

McCree just barely tipped his head in thought. This stranger was good at deflecting attention away from himself; he was making himself look harmless now. McCree shifted slightly, setting his hand on Peacekeeper with what would look to anyone watching like lazy thoughtlessness.

"He had the bow and arrows with him," another spotter wiped rainwater off her face. "No other weapons. Might be just a hunter, someone separated from a group of tourists on a sport hunt, maybe?"

"Figured you could talk to him," the lead spotter paused and shook his head like a dog, spraying water over the waiting room, his two spotters, and the stranger. Only the spotters showed a trace of irritation. "No idea what he speaks but we tried about seven languages between us and got nothing."

"Really?" McCree was watching the stranger with growing interest.

The stranger was familiar in a way someone becomes when you see the traces of what they leave behind. Familiar in the way you know someone when you see their work a lot. McCree tried to keep his eager heart from beating so hard against his ribs. Tried to muzzle his wildest hope before they overran his caution.

"See now,” McCree said slowly, “I think he's pretty calm for a man who's been surrounded by armed folks, been tied him up and dragged through the woods no small distance to a century old train station on an abandoned line with no explanation."

The three spotters had apparently not thought of this. They looked at the stranger, then at each other with rising confusion.

McCree took a breath, and hoped he hadn't wasted his time out here. "Well, darling? You got a name we can call you?"

The stranger kept still, but McCree saw his eyelashes flicker, then their prisoner raised his head and caught McCree's gaze with a glare.

McCree's breath caught, and he just managed to keep himself still, keep his calm, keep his poker face. He wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but the face of the man looking up at him wasn't it. The stranger, their prisoner, was glaring at McCree with perfect composure and no fear in him.

He was probably Blackwatch.

And he was unnervingly handsome.

"Hanzo," the stranger said.

McCree let his breath out.

"Son of a bitch," the lead spotter spit indelicately on the floor and tipped one leg back at the knee to let water pour out of one rubber boot, then the other. "Son of a _bitch_ , we've been dragging him through the rain for..."

"Having a lively conversation, I hope," McCree said pleasantly.

"No," one spotter retorted, and McCree had the pleasure of watching the other two shoot a guilty glance at one another.

"Nothing interesting anyway,” came the amendment after a beat.

"Uh-huh," McCree shifted his weight from left to right, cocked his head the other way and breathed a little easier. Behind them, he just barely thought he saw their new guest, Hanzo, flicked an eyebrow. "Get back out on patrol," McCree said to the three spotters.

"We've finished."

"Then just get out."

All three looked dismayed, standing in a ring of shed rain water with the heavens wide open behind them.

The lead spotter huffed briefly, and dropped the bow and arrows onto the hardwood without further comment. His partners pushed Hanzo down onto his knees and he kept still, bent forward again while the three drenched spotters wandered back out onto the train platform under the wide roof. They turned down the platform, and wandered away out of sight.

They left the door open behind Hanzo, and left his weapons only a few feet from him. But they left Hanzo and McCree alone, and that was all McCree wanted.

Once the sound of McCree's three spotters faded and the sound of the rain hammering on the roof was the only thing they could hear, Hanzo sat upright slowly, and seemed to settle himself. Less a prisoner and more a man sitting with perfect composure waiting to hear whatever it was that McCree might have to offer him.

"Your soldiers are poorly trained." Hanzo remarked, and brought his hands from behind his back. He tossed something  towards McCree over the wet floor.

McCree didn't look down as a set of empty, unbroken handcuffs slid to a stop between them.

"You're not wrong. Truth to tell I'm not sure they know how to salute," McCree admitted with good grace—after all he had never needed them to. "But they were a gift and I don't have the receipt to send them back to store, so I guess I'm stuck with them." McCree made his way back to the tables by the platform windows. He kept his hand on Peacekeeper. The bow had been dumped on the floor close enough to count their prisoner as armed as far as McCree cared. If there was going to be a fight, McCree wanted the advantage of being the quick draw shooting straight while Hanzo would have to take up his bow, then turn.

Hanzo just grunted, politely ignored his bow and quiver as he adjusted his seat to face McCree again, and put his hands in his lap. "They didn't say anything particularly interesting.".

McCree shrugged. It was easy not to worry about secret keeping when you barely knew what you were doing sometimes. "I don't mind, why don't you tell me why you're here, Hanzo. Say," McCree went on, fishing for something, anything, to firm up his suspicions, "you got another half a name kicking around?"

"My name's Hanzo."

"Just Hanzo, well, alright," McCree flicked through a half dozen likely aliases and discarded them. He opened his mouth, then at the last second didn't say what he'd been intending to. "Real nice to meet you."

"A pleasure," Hanzo said flatly.

"Sure," McCree agreed. He kept moving slow, kept his eyes on Hanzo, on that bow a few feet away from him. Kept his hand on Peacekeeper. Hanzo didn't move unless it was deliberate. His voice was low and his accent was light. He was watching McCree with calm but voracious interest and McCree could only hope he knew why this man was here, behaving so politely.

A few moments of embarrassed silence followed, neither man apparently willing to ask what the hell was going on or who the hell they were actually talking to.

To McCree's relief, Hanzo spoke first, sounding irritated about it.

"I'm seeking a weapons dealer."

Easy, McCree had to keep yanking on the bridle of his wildly, improbable hopeful assumptions. "That so."

The scowl that darkened Hanzo's face was startling in its suddenness and absolute honesty. For the first time, McCree noticed the rainwater trickling down Hanzo's face; his hair was dripping, every stitch and rivet of clothing and armor was drenched through.

"Yes," Hanzo said in a voice was would have been a snarl if it had been only marginally less polite about it.

"Must need to speak to this dealer pretty badly," McCree yanked on the bridle of his wildest hopes and dreams again. There was a lot riding on why the hell this man was here.

He could, after all, just be here to try and buy a classified experimental rifle for some casual skeet shooting. It wasn't without precedent.

"Yes," Hanzo admitted, clearly enraged by his own admission.

Uttery unused to being on this end of an interrogation, McCree noted. Then realized his time here would be worthless if Hanzo simply stood up and walked away. He rushed to make some kind of effort to be worth a conversation at least.

"Congratulations, you've found an arms dealer," McCree shrugged. "Or a splinter of us," he amended, scrupulously honest.

For a moment, Hanzo stayed perfectly still and quiet, something in what McCree had said apparently resonating in him.

"What are you looking to buy?" McCree asked.

"Is this a joke?"

"What?"

"You're simply admitting you're a splinter of an international weapons dealing organization? Do you frequently admit this to strangers who might easily be in law enforcement?"

McCree stared at his guest, uncharitably annoyed, both at the tone of professional sneer and at the absolute honesty.

"Are you?" he asked bluntly.

"What?" Hanzo unconsciously mimicked McCree' tone from just a moment ago.

"Law enforcement," McCree said. Unconsciously, he'd slipped his hand around Peacekeeper and only realized it when his knuckles went white.

He'd been an idiot to try and meet this truculent asshole halfway. Blackwatch was law enforcement, sort of. The comparison was like pointing out that both a nerve gas and a grizzly bear are dangerous.

Hanzo scowled at him. It was such an honest expression, it was almost a disappointment when he reined it back and his face fell back to the bland neutrality of icy interest.

"No," The word came out tipped with ice. "I'm not here to buy a weapon or a tank. I want to talk to the leader of Deadlock Gang."

McCree wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but his wildest hopes and dreams gave a valiant effort to slip their halter. "You came looking—" he stopped himself before he could sound dreamy. Swallowing, he glanced at the door to the station master’s office and called, "Reeha!"

Someone behind that door put down a pencil with a lot of force and a moment later, the door opened with a jerk. "What do you want now you-- Oh." She caught sight of Hanzo, looked from him back to McCree, her face settled into a blandly hateful expression. "Oh no."

"This here's Hanzo, Hanzo, this is Fareeha." McCree made the introductions without a shred of hesitation. "Hanzo's got something to say to the leader of Deadlock." 

 Fareeha transferred her gaze from Hanzo to McCree with an almost palpable effort. Then she focused her attention on glaring him through. "Sorry for the inconvenience of talking to this idiot, Hanzo. Our leader's an irrepressible fat head with delusions of competence who thinks McCree here's doing a fine job. His only actual act of competence is ensuring I do all the work. Where do you come from and why are you here?"

Hanzo glanced between McCree and Fareeha. "I'm from Blackwatch. I want amnesty." He said bluntly.

McCree's wildest hopes and dreams raced away crowing and McCree had to grip the edge of his desk to keep from heaving a sigh of relief.

"Impossible," Fareeha said with curt finality, and McCree's newfound buoyancy and Joie-de-vivre pitched sideways into the same shrieking death dive as an airplane that suddenly finds itself with 50% less wingspan.

"Reeha," he snapped, nearly choking on his tongue as she ignored him.

"If you are from Blackwatch, then you know we'll take you prisoner, but that's not going to be the same as amnesty.” Reeha said with grand dismissiveness. “Blackwatch has been hunting us for over a year. And we've had to take drastic measures to avoid them. If you're here, I must assume we're discovered, and we need to take steps to recover our safety and security elsewhere..."

Hanzo was talking over her, furious, never rising off his knees, never moving his hands or looking threatening, never giving either Fareeha or McCree a reason to draw to fire on him. McCree couldn't help himself, and began barking at Fareeha, gripping the edge of the table and trying to keep his posture and not panic. All his wildest hopes and dreams were right here in a death spin. All three of them were talking at once and at cross purposes and McCree needed this to succeed...

"Hold it," Fareeha barked out, a savage command that silenced both Hanzo and McCree.

The waiting room was in perfect silence for a moment. Then Azizi, Reeha’s slightly damp white cat, walked in from the train platform and looked at each of them in turn. Hanzo, McCree, and Fareeha all looked back at her, and watched as she walked around Hanzo without showing a shred of concern, then made a circuit of the waiting room with a steady plodding gate. She finished her patrol, licked a paw, stared at Hanzo, then at McCree, huffed a disappointed sigh and walked to Fareeha, lifting her tail in stately greeting.

"Hello, Azizi," Fareeha said with perfect politeness. She bent to pet the cat's long back as she walked past her into the office. The cat gave a casual _pprpt_ as she passed, but didn't break stride to linger, and disappeared behind the edge of the door.

Hanzo was looking murderous.

McCree shut his eyes and wished Fareeha had adopted a dog instead.

"As I was saying. . ." Fareeha hut the door to the office again, giving McCree barely a glimpse of Azizi settling into the open maw of Fareeha's case of order papers and requisitions. Their entire paper filing system was about 23% cat hair by weight now.

"I'm not here to arrest you, I’m here to seek protection." Hanzo interrupted, then faltered, apparently having to work to force his next words out. "I’m here seeking your help."

For the first time, Hanzo's hands had curled into fists on his lap. That last word had nearly choked him.

Fareeha came to stand before Hanzo, one hand on the pistol at her hip, first finger pointing down, the other loose at her side. McCree had talked to her about this, but when Fareeha was annoyed with him, she fell back into the trained stance of an RCMP officer with some questions.

The silence went on a while, as Fareeha apparently mentally weighed up the advantages of playing good cop, bon cop, since in her mind McCree was abysmal cop.

"Blackwatch has fallen. Our organization was revealed to the world at large and we are being hunted down." Hanzo filled the silence before Fareeha could decide.

McCree watched Fareeha for the reaction he knew was coming. She blinked in recognition, but didn't throw anything at him, so it wasn't as bad as he'd been expecting. But the glare that lanced over Hanzo's head and into McCree's eyes ran him through and should have left a charred hole in the wall behind him. He shrugged at her.

"I had no idea," Fareeha said, with forced calm and complete honesty. "When?"

"Three days ago." Hanzo sounded like he was admitting some personal failure on his part. Like hunting down an international black market weapons dealer and pinpointing their current location in only three days while running from international outrage was an egregiously lazy time frame.

McCree made a sudden, aborted gesture of surprise. Fareeha ignored him, but there was a flicker in Hanzo's attention that meant he'd probably noticed.

"You made good time," Fareeha remarked.

"I had a two year head start," Hanzo growled, unable to keep the irritation out his voice. "I was the one hunting you for all this time."

"Just you?" Fareeha's jaw tightened marginally. McCree smirked. They had made a bet about this a few months ago.

"Mostly," Hanzo shook his head, clearly annoyed. "You've kept yourselves free from everyone and everything for a long time, even though you smuggle everything and anything. I want you to smuggle Blackwatch now."

"If you've fallen, like you said, you can't afford us," Fareeha spoke with a tone of finality that McCree could have kicked her for. She popped the catch on her holster and the motion and the tiny sound jolted McCree into action and caused Hanzo to freeze, coiled and ready for anything.

"Reeha, consider the alternatives," McCree said, trying not to sound anxious as he talked fast. "What are you--"

"The hell are you talking over me for," Fareeha cut him off adroitly. "You have aspersions of outranking me anytime soon?"

McCree shut his mouth and glared at her. She glared back with one eyebrow up.

"I can pay in information," Hanzo spoke quickly into the reprieve from summary execution by a six foot tall former law enforcement officer with a handgun and no apparent mercy in her eyes.

"Information?" Fareeha's gaze shifted back to Hanzo.

"What kind of—" McCree leaned forwards despite himself.

"Well, that's as may be," Fareeha cut McCree off again, clearly relishing her apparent leadership over him. "However, you'd have to speak to my commander about that, and I guess they're nowhere the hell to be found."

"Fareeha," McCree finally broke down, cupping one hand over his eyes. "Give it up. Alright, Hanzo, what exactly are you offering?"

Hanzo’s gaze flicked from Fareeha to McCree. This time he kept his silence, filled with haughty outrage, and McCree wondered how badly he'd bungled this. His hopes and dreams of this very encounter were still in a death spiral.

"Talk to him," Fareeha jerked a thumb at McCree. "And don't blame me, he's the one who thinks he’s funny."

Hanzo glared at McCree, his expression fluent in its range from outrage to irritation and accented by contempt.

"My name's Jesse McCree," he belatedly introduced himself and pulled his hand off his face. "I run Deadlock."

The _plink-plink-plink_ that McCree hadn't been paying attention to suddenly changed as the bucket filled and the sound of the dripping had nowhere to resonate. Time had passed and McCree automatically stepped over to the bucket and picked it up.

"You?" Hanzo watched as McCree tossed the bucket out the front door, away from Hanzo, then began making his way back. "You run Deadlock? I've been hunting _you_ for the better part of two years?"

More than an hint of contempt. McCree set the bucket down and tried to ignore how much Fareeha was enjoying this.

"Expecting someone else?" McCree leaned against his table again, set his hand back on Peacekeeper and stared Hanzo back down with his head tipped low and his eye shadowed under his hat brim.

"Yes.”

"Well, excuse me for giving you the run around with Fareeha She is my second and sometimes I require her to perform some. . .  menial tasks on my behalf to earn her place here." McCree said, entirely for the benefit of watching Fareeha go from smug to nearly incandescent with rage. "However my second in command is unable to perform even a basic interrogation without becoming pedantic and resorting to name calling so..."

Fareeha snorted at him, her arms crossed.

"So," McCree went on, marshalling his dignity. "Now we all know who the hell we are and why the hell we have the misfortune to be stuck in the same room."

"We can enjoy finer company," Fareeha reached behind her, opened the door to the office and called "Azizi!"

The cat, roused from her case of multimillion dollar documents, poked her head around the door, glanced around, then looked up at Fareeha in mute disgust for the gross breach of trust committed to awaken it. Fareeha bent, gave her a cat treat from one pocket, then flicked a few more into the middle of the room as a bribe.

"There," she said, as they all watched Azizi noisily grunt and smack and crunch her way through morsels of dried sheep lung. “At least we’re stuck here with a cat.”

"You're both so helpful," McCree said to Azizi flatly. "Anyway, Hanzo, what, exactly are you offering?"

"The accumulated wealth of Blackwatch's Archive," Hanzo said with blunt unwillingness to bargain. He was staring at Azizi with an expression of baffled outrage.

McCree opened his mouth, pleased by this carrot. Then Hanzo introduced the stick.

"And the certainty that the information we have won't fall to anyone other than you."

Ah. McCree nodded. Two years spent investigating, and Hanzo had actually managed to get face to face with McCree in a few days. So that meant information Blackwatch has accumulated was a valuable bargaining chip if only to avoid someone else using it to track him down.

McCree took a moment and watched Azizi finish mauling her impromptu snack and sit in the middle of the floor looking smugly beatific and grooming her ears with one big paw. Azizi was a useful place for his eyes to rest while he thought through the eventualities.

"What exactly do you want?" McCree asked, still keeping Hanzo in the corner of his eye. Still had Fareeha watching him with her hand on her beretta. "Amnesty's a pretty big word. A lot of meanings."

"There are three people, including myself,” Hanzo delivered his terms without hesitation. “You will take us into your protection. You will keep us in good care. You will hide us. And you will bring us to a location we can consolidate our resources."

"You want deliverance," McCree nodded.

Azizi wandered to the bucket, stuck her head in for a drink and came out outraged and offended when water fell on the back of her neck. She shook her head in disgust and tramped towards Hanzo.

McCree watched this small performance and went on, "You want to dodge, what, Interpol, UN, there's got to be a couple of private and national task forces after you by now?"

Hanzo nodded, but it didn't seem to trouble him. Clearly a man who judged his worth by his enemies. "As people, we’re of limited value to everyone but ourselves," Hanzo looked McCree squarely in the eye. "The Blackwatch Archive is the valuable part of this. All the information we've found on your competitors, all the information we have on you."

"All that sounds nice and all but," McCree was mentally rubbing his hands together, his hopes and dreams were pulling up out of their death spiral.

Too soon it turned out.

"And it contains all the information we've falsified," Hanzo was watching McCree as his gaze snapped up from Azizi.

"Falsified," McCree echoed.

"We corrupted our files. I admit the act nearly put my commander in intensive care, but it can be reversed, if one of Blackwatch works on it.”

"Oh, that's clever," McCree said flatly, and truthfully.

Not all our files were corrupted like this," Hanzo went on, watching McCree with flat hostility. "The data we have on you was all perfectly accessible."

"Pardon?" McCree wondered when he'd completely lost track of this negotiation. Wondered when the carrot had gotten so far away and why the stick looked more like a sword.

"Since we came to you for amnesty first, it would be foolish to falsify data on you."

The waiting room suddenly became very, very quiet.

It wasn't a threat. It wasn't a threat the same way a bullet in a gun isn't lethal. The same way any arrow in the quiver lying a few feet behind Hanzo wasn't lethal. The same way that McCree's fucking arrogance hadn't been lethal until right here, right now, when Hanzo had weaponized it. Nothing is lethal until the situation becoming exciting.

Refuse me, Hanzo said, and I will give the next people I ask for protection everything they need to destroy you. Kill me, Hanzo said, and my commanders will do it. Take me in and break our bargain, Hanzo said, and I will ensure every scrap of information you seek for the rest of my life will lead you to disaster.

For what felt like the first time in his life, McCree felt like he'd been swindled, the first time he'd been on his back foot in a negotiation.

Fareeha was watching McCree more closely, no doubt getting ready to yell at him about this later. McCree had assumed Blackwatch, if they showed up, wouldn’t have any fight left in them. It hadn't even crossed his mind that in its death throes, Blackwatch was perfectly capable of locking its bloody teeth in McCree's throat and pulling him into the light just long enough to die there.

"Well," McCree murmured. "Goddamn."

"Take my commander, my co-lieutenant and myself out of danger." Hanzo returned to the point at issue.

"That would be Gabriel Reyes,?" McCree stopped trying to play this man for information. Hanzo suddenly looked more like a timebomb than a gravy train. "And the other co-commander. He's called Genji, right? Your brother."

For the first time, tension went through Hanzo's posture, not just outrage, it told McCree in no uncertain terms that Hanzo was dangerous.

"You hunted me for nearly two years. Over a year of that time, it was damn near all you did. You don't really think you can stare at me for so long and I wouldn't notice? I've been staring back."

McCree wanted to say more. _I know you_. But clearly, he’d underestimated Hanzo.

McCree didn't have anything else to hurt Blackwatch with. Blackwatch was already dying, already on its way out, and they all knew that. But there was a personal element here. Hanzo's brother Genji was in an unusual position, and while McCree wasn't sure he understood it, he was well aware that Hanzo had done a lot in his life to ensure that his brother wouldn't be at undue risk.

"If you have a counter offer, make it," Hanzo said coldly. Azizi was sitting beside him, lying with her forepaws before her like a sphinx, her tail curled around her side. McCree couldn't tell who was looking at him with more belligerent disrespect.

McCree shifted, restless and uncertain how this had gotten so far away from him. He'd already done work to get to this point, he hadn't expected to do any more.

"I can protect you, and Reyes, and your brother—keep you out of reach of anyone coming after you. That I'll do for the Blackwatch Archive. However. . . " McCree couldn't help tapping his heel to the wall behind him, glancing around. Back to a wall, limited sight lines for snipers around him, even if it wasn't pouring buckets. No sign of any danger. The mental checklist he flicked through  hundreds of times a day ran in his mind and he clenched one hand in irritation at his own behavior.

"I'm in the unfortunate position of being something of a wanted man myself. You might think we're impervious to examination." McCree glanced at Fareeha, who simply looked back at him, blank faced. "But we’re not unknown. So maybe you can ensure your survival a little longer by prolonging mine."

Hanzo regarded him with flat discontent. "You're being hunted. You," Hanzo raised one hand for the first time and stabbed a finger towards McCree, "are under threat? No, then I rescind my request. If you can't keep yourself out of danger, I don't believe you can keep us out either."

"Suit yourself," McCee said, before he could say something idiotic and probably incendiary. He crossed his arms.

Fareeha looked cooly unruffled.

Hanzo blinked again. Apparently he hadn’t expected McCree’s responce. "What exactly are you asking?"

"I won’t take you on if you’re planning on sabotaging my operation, or endangering my people. I'm saying this potential arrangement," He gestured between himself and Hanzo. "It's less like a commision, more like a partnership. An alliance. You give us the Blackwatch Archive, you get it unlocked for us. In exchange, I'll smuggle any of Blackwatch anywhere they want to go, I'll flex all the power I've got to keep you and your co-commanders out of reach of anyone that wants you dead. But you take a threat against me as a threat against you. Because it will be. And lastly, and most important, the first time you threaten one of my people, it’s over."

McCree stopped himself before he added 'that's the offer, please accept it because I don't have a back up but I think you do.'

Without apparently noticing that he was doing it, Hanzo's hand slid sideways, and settled on Azizi's short white fur and rubbed her ears. Everything was quiet, except the rain falling into the bucket with a _plink-plink-plink_ , the old station roof being hammered in the rain, and then, Azizi purring.

Which meant Fareeha would take Hanzo on regardless of his actual credentials. She assumed Azizi had some insight to people's inner worth.

"How soon?" Hanzo asked.

McCree looked up at the station clock, hanging from the peak of the four-sided ceiling on chains, before he remembered it had stopped at 2:13 roughly eighty years ago.

"It's 4pm," Fareeha supplied.

"We can leave here in two hours," McCree huffed. "Tell your people to go to Cody Falls by 7:30, Russet by 8:15, Westport Junction by 10:20 or Timberwolf Station by 1 in the goddamn morning. Whatever they prefer. We can pick them up on the way."

Hanzo looked so nonplussed McCree realized he'd had no idea how exactly Deadlock had been managing to stay out of sight for so long.

"What," Hanzo said with forced calm, "do any of those places have connecting them? They aren't even connected by direct roads. You can't fly there so slowly, how are you..."

"Do we have a deal?" McCree cut across him. "Transportation's one of my many problems here, it's not yours. We're gonna do this, you gotta trust me. I'm going to treat your secrecy as careful as I've been treating mine, you hear?"

Hanzo nodded curtly, "Then yes." The word sounded unexpected off his tongue, and despite himself, McCree sagged internally with relief. "Yes, we have an agreement. Archive, and unlocking it, in exchange for safe passage."

"Shake on it," McCree said, pushing his luck because there was always a chance it might push back.

"What?"

"I said, stand up, and let’s shake on it."

Hanzo looked at McCree, then glanced at Fareeha, who shrugged with her arms crossed, her beretta buckled back in her holster.

He wasn't too fast when he rose, but the movement confirmed to McCree that he could have been off his knees and probably armed himself in much less time than a casual observer would have suspected.

"If any of my people suffer at your hands," Hanzo said quietly to McCree, "there will be consequences."

"I'd expect as much," McCree said, perfectly honest. Hanzo had managed to turn Blackwatch's demise into a weapon capable to reducing McCree nearly to begging for Hanzo to join them. "Same goes for my folk. You start playing dirty? You can take your chances with my second over there."

Hanzo tipped his head, waiting. "Not you?"

McCree pushed himself up from the table and began to cross to Hanzo. "Oh, I don't know if that's necessary. I taught her everything she knows."

"It's why he has so little left," Fareeha said, the old jibe more affectionate then sour.

McCree spared her a quick smile in reply, then sobered, looking at Hanzo as they stood facing each other. "What do you say?" McCree held his hand out. "We got a deal, partner?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading! The next chapter will be posted on September 11. I am also writing Fool's Gold; a McHanzo AU in which Hanzo is a dragon that recruits the monster hunter McCree. The tenth chapter will be posted on September 4, if it sounds like your thing please check it out!  
> Art for this fic is by [The Archivist](http://hellomynameisandiam.tumblr.com/), who has been awesome to work with all this time TuTb and very patient as I struggle with learning how to function on AO3 like a real writer. OTL  
> Please stop by [my Tumblr](http://leoandlancer.tumblr.com) if you have any requests or questions!


	3. Walls Can be Comfortable with the Right Company

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update a full day late because ya girl played the new Busan map for fully 5 hours yesterday. OTL

Deadlock was a ghost.

Worse than a ghost; ghosts have stories about them, legends. Tourists pay local guides to walk them around a town just to hear about the local haunts. They were accepted as a known thing. Even if they weren't real, people would believe in them, even say they saw them. Pascal's wager on an urban legend scale.

Deadlock did not have the advantage of having an iota of the popularity the local dead enjoyed. Deadlock had nothing. Not a rumour, not a sighting, not a blurry photograph to mark a discussion about film tampering or Photoshop. Deadlock simply existed as an absence of money, weapons, and illegal merchandise that would vanish, and stay completely untraceable and unfindable for months or possibly years until surfacing again, in the hands of an owner who was significantly less wealthy than they had been.

When Hanzo started hunting Deadlock, the lack of information almost drove him insane. He had felt like he was fishing in the dark on a raft, holding a lantern over deep water and trying to see the flash of a scale below him. Eventually, he learned to track the voids where weapons or money or illegal merchandise ought to be, but wasn't. He learned to track where a demand for something was, or would be.

He made the mistake of explaining his work to Genji using the term “dark side of the moon”. After listening carefully, Genji burst out into the chorus to _Be A Man_ from the Disney classic, the 1999 blockbuster _Mulan_ and Hanzo was nearly driven to fratricide for the second time in his life.

Finally the name came to Hanzo after eight months of fishing. He was perched on an I-beam spanning a warehouse in the vieux-port of a city on the river. He'd spent six hours, alone except for a booming metropolis of spiders, waiting. Waiting, feeling foolish, with a Disney song stuck in his head. To focus, he kept going over what he knew. There were a number of unexpected ships in port, a unusually high number of yachts in the marina, and the luxury hotels were suddenly booked full. He knew that, in this city, there was a void in the criminal market that was crying out to be filled.

"Deadlock will sell to us," said the head of the city's most powerful, heavily armed and legalized gang. "Come on, cough it up. We agreed we'd meet their prices."

It was startling, having the confirmation that what Hanzo was looking for was a single organization and not a network, or a series of unrelated contracts or requisitions. Like after holding a lantern over dark water for hours, he’d seen a fish jump.

Hanzo went straight to Reyes when he’d returned from the vieux-port. "The dealer I’m tracking may be a problem."

"Get a name on the dealer?" Reyes had been in the tall room of the historic property Blackwatch rented under a shell company. The two tall casement windows faced east, towards the harbour, and in the mid morning his office was bright with tawny mid autumn sunshine. He'd been flipping idly through Hanzo's report, coffee cradled in one hand, last night's work bandaged and healing on his bare arms.

"Deadlock," Hanzo said.

Then he was snapped into battle ready, adrenaline-fueled focus.

The sound of shattering ceramic can do that to a highly trained killer. Shattering ceramic and the face of his commander going slack with shock and horror.

Had Hanzo still been armed, he'd have probably fired on the innocently closed door of Reyes' office.

"Reyes?" after a second of screaming tension, Hanzo realized Reyes hadn't actually looked towards an oncoming threat, hadn't drawn his weapons or given any orders. He’d dropped his coffee and frozen.

Reyes just stared at Hanzo, standing in a pool of good, Northside blend coffee at 10:05am, AST, looking like he'd been gut shot.

"Reyes, are you poisoned?" Hanzo ran through a hasty triage of things that could make Reyes look like this. It wasn't a long list. Reyes shook his head, and tension began easing out of Hanzo’s shoulders. Fear was rushing to fill the void the tension had left.

"Did you say Deadlock?" Reyes' voice was soft.

"Yes."

"Shit." Reyes slumped against his desk like he had no strength for his usual grace.

"Yes?"

"Shit." Reyes cupped both hands around his nose and mouth, something Hanzo had never seen him do.

"Reyes," Hanzo tried to contain his confusion. It made him short tempered. "Can you--"

Reyes wasn't listening to him, all his attention turned in, pressed down, something in the theatre of his memories holding him hostage inside his own head. It happened to all of them sometimes, but it was always inconvenient when Hanzo just wanted to get this briefing over with and go to bed.

Hanzo didn't try to stop Reyes when he left. He didn't make a sound, didn't acknowledge Hanzo in the slightest, just left coffee boot-prints on the ancient hardwood as he walked straight past Hanzo, opened the door and left without bothering to shut his office door behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, Hanzo found Reyes in the rooftop garden, standing a respectful distance from the beehive and staring blankly at the flourishing rhododendron in the autumn sunshine. The leaves of were firebrand red at the tip, fading to yellow, then a pale, delicate green at the stem. The bush looked incandescent with autumn colour.

Wordlessly, Hanzo held out a mug to Reyes, who stared at it in flat disinterest until the smell reached him, then he took it with a grumble of thanks.

Hanzo sipped his own coffee, looked out at the wide open canyon between the old town buildings on one side of the street, and the skyscrapers on the other, and watched the rough water of the harbour glitter.

Reyes had almost six inches of height on Hanzo, and maybe thirty pounds on him besides. He was their commander, had saved Hanzo, and therefore Genji, more times then he kept track of. He had pulled international situations away from conflict for decades. Ruthless and brilliant and unstoppable, Reyes had been the only safe thing in Hanzo's life for a long time.

And Reyes was terrified.

It was a hard thing for Hanzo to wrap his head around.

"Deadlock's bad," Reyes said, unnecessarily at this point. He'd ignored his lieutenant and quit his office after smashing his favorite mug, wasting the first coffee of the day. All that spoke louder than any words he could use.

"You've run into them before?"

"No. Yes," Reyes took a moment, making up his mind.

Hanzo drank half his coffee and waited. A bus pulled up at the ferry terminal and crowds of people in sweaters and hats poured past each other. It was frosh week, Hanzo dimly remembered, and there was an irresponsible number of children below them in little groups.

"I broke Deadlock," Reyes said, his voice was far away. "I broke its back damn near twenty years ago. Back when its leader was a fatheaded old school gangster. He'd built up a nice little smuggling operation, weapons mostly, New Mexico. They were pretty stupid, pretty hot headed, left a lot of damage everywhere they went. Too well armed to touch for awhile. But the old guy was a luddite to the core. No grasp of modern advances. He just did the same damn things, over and over, never fucking learned, never fucking modernized."

Hanzo finished his coffee as seagulls turned lazy circles overhead, and a few yachts came and went on what could be their last sail before winter.

"Back when Overwatch was still around," Reyes paused, cleared his throat. He almost never talked about his time in Overwatch. "A long time ago. Overwatch and Blackwatch led a joint task force, quick and dirty. Deadlock died in an afternoon with damn near all of its people. We arrested a few and charged them, fed them into counter terrorism. We recruited..."

Reyes stopped. He looked down into his untasted coffee and took a long breath that shook at the end. He took a sip with his eyes shut.

"There was," Reyes said, "in the common parlance, a major fuck up. We tried to recruit one of the gang members. Things were good for a while. Then they weren’t. I couldn’t... “ Reyes trailed off, stared into his mug.

Hanzo waited.

“I misjudged the situation.” Reyes said after a while. He said it carefully, like he was dealing with shards of razor edged glass instead of words. “When the dust settled, we knew anything out of Deadlock was bad. We went out hunting, went out to make goddamn sure any trace of Deadlock went down the hard way. But there was nothing left. I knew, I fucking--"

Reyes broke off, took too big a mouthful of coffee and Hanzo watched him fight his way through coffee burning his tongue.

"I knew they weren't gone and I never fucking found them again," Reyes coughed, coming up for air after nearly choking on a robust blend of locally roasted bean juice.

Hanzo finished his coffee and kept watching the gulls. "If it makes you feel any better," he said flatly, "I haven't found them."

Hanzo kept chasing Deadlock with the single minded focus he'd previously only used to get Genji out of Japan. He followed them, stayed patient, waited for them to tire, to slow the fuck down, waited for a single piece of concrete evidence to surface. Waited, and looked, and nothing happened. Deadlock was still a name given tongue only when the speaker knew they spoke to those who already knew it.

It was maddening. Hanzo couldn't answer the most basic question: brick and mortar. They were a smuggling operation, they had physical merchandise they needed to put somewhere. They needed pursers and forklift drivers and administrators and information gathers and thieves and drivers and a goddamn tea room for taking breaks in. So where the fuck were they?

It had been a stressful two years.

Hanzo stood in the pouring rain outside an decrepit station and felt more than two years of cumulative stress and curiosity and frustration and Genji’s song was stuck in his head as he stared. Hanzo struggled to breath.

"Welcome to the Adamant," McCree said, walking past Hanzo onto the train platform. "You comin?"

"A train," Hanzo said.

Two years and picking through every scrap of a warehouse, every possible location for Deadlock to thrive in. Two years of hunting to find where Deadlock took their goddamn tea break.

Two years of looking for a warehouse or an abandoned apartment building or an underground complex or a goddamn castle on an active volcano and here he was, staring up at a _train._

It was ancient. It ran on rails. It might be dependant on coal. Hanzo had spent two years hunting for Deadlock, and he'd found them relying on four hundred year old technology in an overgrown part of the world too heavily damaged from the war to even support farming.

"Sure." McCree paused at the head of one of the cars, his lieutenant ahead of him, looking back at Hanzo. "You didn't know?"

The tiny grin at the corner of McCree's mouth nearly ended their arrangement in a murder. Hanzo managed to pull his frustration down from rage to a simmering resentment and looked with deliberate slowness from the train's vast, growling beast of an engine to McCree. Under the weight of his glare, McCree lasted a few seconds, then coughed and looked away.

"Adamant's one of our tricks, one of the best, anyway. Come on, you want to get out of here, and we need to move. Been here long enough to draw attention."

Hanzo checked to make sure the Adamant didn’t actually have a coal store. The engine did draw the eye; it was a massive matte black beast with a pointed cow catcher on its face and dark red detail on her trim and wheels. It steamed in the cold rain that poured down its sides. The cars themselves looked uncertain in origin, heavy looking construction, probably reinforced, and strangely old-fashioned. They looked almost quaint.

Hanzo was still glaring at the train when McCree climbed up a narrow iron stair to the door to the second car, and looked back. He didn’t look smug now, just watchful.

If Hanzo had been in a better state, he might have wondered why McCree looked like he was holding his breath.  

As it was, Hanzo tried to quell the urge to throw something at the smug gang lord who’d evaded him for two years. He was reaching the end of his own control when Aziz the cat ambled past him, tail up, paws stomping heavily enough to make the rain on the platform spatter up. She drew Hanzo’s attention as she stepped up to the car with a sense of ownership only cats can really project, and jumped lightly up the stairs to join McCree.

That did it, that the cat could manage this with more dignity than he could. Hanzo walked through the rain and stepped up the narrow iron-grate stairs. There was a hand-carved little curl at at the ends of the handrail, so well done it looked organic.

There were people inside the car when Hanzo climbed in through the sliding wooden door. He had assumed the train would be empty, packed with merchandise, maybe, but not bustling with people. McCree was waiting for him, chatting idly with a few people under hanging oil lanterns in thick cages of only slightly battered metal. Hanzo barely acknowledged the nods from the people in coveralls or greasy teeshirts and ripped dickie pants. He followed McCree past a tiny cast iron stove with a basket of wood beside it, six bed boxes piled in twos, and a narrow table down the side of the train with a bench under the windows. There were cards on the table, a chess board poised mid-game at one end.

Hanzo followed McCree without a word as they passed from one car to the next. The narrow space between cars was dark with smoke and iron, a narrow bridge of metal spanning from one sliding door to another. The next car was another sleeper with ten small bedboxes, and Hanzo saw more wood and iron, oil lights and squashed paper in follios and a engineering diagram across the wall beside the door. There were just a couple of lockers for a table and benches. A net stretched overhead from the ceiling, stuffed with old paper-bound novels and anthologies. This car was empty: the lively chatter from the last car almost noticeably absent, the stove cold, and an unused neatness to the beds.  

The train jerked under his feet. Hanzo didn’t say a damn word as he caught his balance, and continued after McCree as they started moving.

Another narrow door, another little bridge to yet another car, a galley with a wood burning stove. Two cooks were working hard with their heads down and greeted McCree with easy friendliness and nodded amiably enough at Hanzo. Tables under the windows, long benches for seating a crowd in here. More oil lamps, sconces on the wall with mirrors behind the candles. Near the far door, there was a bookshelf with a bar across each line of books to keep them in place.

Hanzo had trouble keeping his frustration leashed as McCree walked a little ahead of him through the next car. This one was almost familiar to Hanzo, in function if not in the particulars.  Long tables ran down both sides of the car, a few benches or stools, boxes of tall books, a few crates of note cards were all shoved under the tables and into brackets to keep them from sliding. Some of the windows were papered over with maps and diagrams, charts and lists and engineering sheets. One window was crowded with playing cards written over in bold marker, taped up with coloured string connecting one card to another to another to a whole cluster.

Hanzo was out of the car and halfway down the next one before he recognized the goddamn dewey decimal system. The revival of a three hundred year old book keeping system should not have reduced his self control down to its last parting thread, but it did.

McCree finally stopped in the hallway outside a row of three private cabins. The walls were pale wood, scorched in places, and the windows were flat glass that showed his reflection in the lamp light. The outside world was rushing along, the train picking up speed and making the rain run on a diagonal down the glass.

"Here," McCree unlocked a door and slid it back. “Your cabin, if you want it.”

Hanzo had a glimpse of a warm, clean space four metres wide. He took in a few details. The lamps were already lit, and here was a stack of folded clothing on the bed, some towels, a little rack of paperback books on the wall. This anachronistic cabin was laid ready for him.

The featherlight control Hanzo had been keeping over his temper snapped.

The strike was unplanned and barely aimed. Hanzo hadn't meant to take a swing at McCree at all, but the moment the heel of his palm struck McCree’s jaw Hanzo knew he'd never regret this.

McCree swore and swayed where he stood, stepping back and saving his hat instead of clutching at his jaw before rounding back on Hanzo with a bloody snarl.

"A train," Hanzo was panting, fists at his sides, shoulders back head down, glaring at McCree with a fury that made it hard to breathe. "I have been looking for you, I have been tearing the criminal world _apart_ looking for you, for two years and I find you in a train made of wood and steel and powered by coal--"

"Diesel," McCree snapped, interrupting him, "Adamant's a diesel engine, 1200 horsepower, 1975--"

"It can to go straight to hell." Hanzo almost lashed out again, two years of frustration brought to a head by oil lamps and paper-bound ledgers. "You ran your organization out of this and you never used a single piece of technology did you? You kept your paper trail on _paper_."

"Of course I did!" McCree shouted back at him, arms spread wide and blood on his chin. "I run the damn thing on cheap industrial quality diesel and light us with kerosene and make repairs to her with cast iron and wood and wax and lanolin and anything I can get my hands on for cash or trade! My engineers are drop outs and folks with death certificates who built this beside me! I ain't running an online boutique, Hanzo, I'm running a smuggling operation that could buy the market!"

"On paper! I saw an _abacus_ in there," Hanzo shouted, gesturing back at the paper filled car with the maps on the windows, the cards with their cats cradle of coloured string. Entire criminal organizations spread out on face-cards bound in yarn. "You ran all this on nothing and I--"

"I run it on people," McCree snarled back at him. "I know someone from Reyes' Blackwatch might not understand that!"

They were shouting at each other, standing in the hallway leaning into their anger, teeth flashing. On one side, the outside world was a mass of dark shapes flying past him, rain drenched and tossed in the wind of their travel. On the other, the open door to Hanzo's cabin was a bright, warm little nook. The bed box was open, and there was a four-point blanket tucked in neatly over the mattress. It looked cosier than Hanzo could admit after the last few days of sleeping in stolen moments on the run.  

"You don't have a single electronic point of information, do you?" Hanzo could feel two years of wasted work sucking at his mind. Two years and he was wondering if he'd need matches to get a light on. "You took the lessons of your luddite leader and took them the other way. You didn't beef up security, you eliminated the need for it."

"Of course I did. I don't have the time or space or expertise to protect myself digitally! As soon as you get good, someone better comes along! But this?" McCree broke off to take a brief furious gesture to take it all in. The wooden train car bound in steel, the boxes of carefully labeled paper in the previous car, the oil lamps and candles and wood-burning stoves for heat. "This is easy," he snarled. "This runs its fucking self. We perfected this goddamned technology three hundred years ago and moved on and here I am making the most of it and just because you couldn’t find--"

Hanzo didn't let him finish. He snapped out, anger and frustration making him faster than his best teachers could have wished for. He sank one fist into McCree's side, under his ribs and shoved an open hand against McCree's shoulder, ramming him against the wood of the cabin wall. McCree gave another curse as his breath left him and something cracked. Hanzo didn't care if it was wood or bone, he needed to hurt something.

"I would not have found you," Hanzo said in a voice so low and rough he barely recognized it.

The words robbed him of something essential, made him realized why his fury was getting the better of him.

Because it was true. Hanzo wouldn't have been able to find Deadlock. Not like they were now, not the way he'd been looking for them.

Hanzo shouldn't have been able to find Deadlock.

And yet...

The thought slipped in, cool and quiet and certain in the frozen rage of his mind, and the rage he’d been trying to control exploded inside him. Before he could take another breath however, McCree reached up and caught Hanzo left-handed by the throat.

"Alright," McCree gasped. "You're right, I might have won. I might have gone on exactly as I have been, because I've spent my life building a pretty wide system to do just that."

He yanked Hanzo around, the strength in his left arm enough to catch Hanzo entirely by surprise and shove him bodilly into the cabin.

"So listen to me," McCree hissed into Hanzo's face as he kicked the door so it rolled shut, closing them into Hanzo's cabin. "I heard about Blackwatch going down. I knew about you, because you were hunting me down and had me watching my back. But you’re in a tight spot, and I need the Blackwatch data. It’s not my fault Blackwatch is dying, I just saw a way that this could benefit both of us.”

Hanzo gave a wordless little snarl of sheer, malevolent fury. Two years was a long time to waste. You could build up a lot of anger in two years.

"I need the Archive, Hanzo," McCree growled. "You need to be smuggled out of dodge. That's all it is. Just what you wanted. I know you got aspirations of putting me behind bars or down a hole or under a lake but Hanzo, now we have a deal."

"You let me catch you," Hanzo felt hot and tense and too big for his own body. Felt like his teeth were longer than they should be. The skin down his left arm was burning hot under its sleeve.

"Yes," McCree said, and the admittance seemed to cost him. He glanced away for just a moment. "I stopped running is all. I let you catch up."

The words were all the motivation Hanzo needed to bring both his hands up and wrench at McCree’s left hand. It was hard under the leather glove.

"It's steel," McCree said, forestalling Hanzo's expert attempts to break his fingers. "Prosthetic. Damnit, Hanzo, your pride really worth so much?"

McCree's hand tightened just barely over Hanzo's throat, then eased, and McCree backed a step, looking frustrated, hands up in what looked like surrender.

Hanzo moved before he knew what he was doing.

McCree gave a hiss of pain as Hanzo grabbed him, wrenched him around and slammed his back against the cabin door, pinning him in place with both hands and the full weight of his body.

"You're fast," McCree remarked, slightly winded.

His voice was light, but he was holding perfectly still, and Hanzo could feel the beat of McCree’s heart through his palms, fast and hard. McCree seemed to be taking a moment to adjust to the situation at hand. Hanzo could only hope it was unfamiliar to him, and that he would be unpracticed at dealing with it. Only partially because Hanzo had no idea why he’d done it.

"Yes, I am," Hanzo said. He kept his voice calm, but that was only because he didn't need to shout just now. He could use his hands to express the violence that was burning the skin of his left arm, clawing up his throat. "I've had two years to hunt you. I'm well trained to hurt people and I've been planning on hurting you for a long time. So listen to me."

McCree didn't move, didn't speak, and kept his head tipped low, watching Hanzo with an inscrutable expression in the dim lamp light.

"Catching you, it's not about my pride," Hazno lied, a little, then went on in a snarling rush before he could try and justify that further. "And you’re right. We made a deal. Your side is to make us vanish, untraceable, like you. I didn’t make this deal to find you’re in the habit of letting yourself be caught when it’s convenient for you. Never let that happen again, McCree.”  

It fell quiet. The train swayed and rushed on through the night, rain running sideways on the windows. The lamp light was soft and golden, and as the lamp swung overhead the shadows rose and fell and shifted like sleepy living things. McCree and Hanzo were both wet from the rain and it was surprisingly warm between their bodies. Hanzo's hands tightened at the realization before his fury had any chance to ebb.

It was hard to be furious at this man when he stood so still, the muscles under Hanzo's hands easing out their tension.

McCree kept his hands at his sides, stood patient and watchful and Hanzo hadn't known if McCree would cower or try and fight him but either would have made this easier. As it was, McCree kept to where Hanzo held him, and they were quiet for long enough Hanzo felt his heart rate slow, and then realized he and McCree’s breathing matched.

"You done?" McCree's voice was soft, low enough Hanzo could feel him talk where their chests were pressed together. "Or are you gonna keep me against this wall until we get comfortable?"

It was childish. Hanzo's hands tightened once, fingertips digging into McCree's skin through his shirt, then he pushed himself away. "Is this a game to you?"

"I've got no answer you won't argue with," McCree retorted. "I can see that. Look, we have a deal. Let me just..." He held his hands up in some kind of placation, and eased around Hanzo until he wasn't against the wall anymore. "Just let me tell you what I'm planning."

Tracking McCree's movements, Hanzo took in the rest of the car almost incidentally.  A bed box, wide by the standards of the train, a stack of neatly folded clothing, an ornamental tin plate behind a candle sconce on the wall by the window, the brass lamp overhead shone like new gold. There was a little table with a bench that lined the corner at a right angle; hardwood worn smooth.

McCree sat at the little bench under the window, easing himself down until he dropped the last few millimetres. Hanzo refocused on him. He hadn't noticed before, but McCree looked exhausted.

"Listen. I need that data you've brought, you need a bolt hole. We got a deal. That's where I'm starting from. Now," McCree rubbed his face with his right hand, lifted his hat and ducked his head to shove his hand through his hair. "We're running out through Russet in about an hour, Westport Junction at 10:30 and Timberwolf Falls at 11:45 before we start through the old forest. If you want Reyes and your brother onboard, along with anyone else, tell them to be at one of those stops.”

Hanzo crossed his arms, and saw McCree's eyes flick to Hanzo's right hand for a moment, then back up.

Rain hushed in a rising wave over the roof, swept across the windows as they went through a particularly heavy downpour. Outside the windows was a dark green rush, the occasional fir branch reaching out to run along the roof or wall of the train cars as they streamed past it. The train rattled and swayed as it ran, nothing like the maglev trains in their troughs through the earth, running at half the speed of sound and so carefully calibrated you could play billiards onboard without issue. This train by comparison felt like a galloping animal, heavy and fast and unstoppable.

Hanzo kept his silence, watching McCree. The anger fizzing in his mind was going flat; he was exhausted and wet and cold.Somewhere, Genji was still hurt, still bleeding, and people were hunting them. It was hard to think, but there were several silent pieces of information Hanzo needed to pay attention to here. The part of Hanzo that had been groomed to become a warlord straightened his posture and ordered him to pay attention.

"Hanzo," McCree started, then ducked his head, pulled his hat off again and raked his hair back. "Damn, you're hard work. Where do you want to pick up your family?"

The word family reached in past the internal struggle between rage and injured pride and opportunism and found enough fraternal interest to make Hanzo blink. He thought of Genji and Reyes, briefly, then the term ‘family’ kept going. It cut straight through him when he thought of the Shimada clan.

The term ‘family’ suddenly reminded him of the polite, obsequious messenger who had approached him in the street the morning Deadlock died, and bowed before asking to speak with him.

While Reyes encountered an assassin in his closely guarded safe house, had his nose bloodied and his world torn into chaos. While Genji fought for his life with no sword, against  three adjuncts to the Shimada clan armed and determined in a filthy alley way. Hanzo had spent an hour sitting in a tea shop as the messenger gave a quiet, respectful, and damning ultimatum.

He recognized her, after a while. His second cousin, a girl a few years younger than him. She and Genji had played together when they were kids.

"Hanzo?" McCree was half standing, frozen, looking like he was halfway to reaching out before he'd stopped himself.

Hanzo dragged in a breath that hurt all the way in. He swallowed hard and opened his mouth. He shook his head at McCree, and swallowed again.

“Sit down, you look like you're fit to fall over.” McCree looked torn, his face drawn in uncertainty and alarm. He clearly didn’t want to get any closer to Hanzo, but couldn’t ignore him.

Hanzo’s posture straightened. His right hand eased from where it had been holding too tight to his left arm. McCree looked like he was going to say something more, and Hanzo cut across him.

"Genji requires healing."

Which wasn’t what McCree had been asking but it was the most important thing Hanzo needed Mccree to know right now.

"Healing... He's hurt?"

"Yes."

"I thought Blackwatch had a doctor." McCree cocked his head, easing back down onto the bench.

"Yes," Hanzo scowled. "We did."

"Oh, I'm sorry," said McCree, clearly misunderstanding Hanzo's expression.

"She's alive," Hanzo said, glancing out at the streaming rain on the windows and considering how long he and Reyes would suffer her to remain so. "She ran."

"Oh." said McCree, much more downrightly this time. "I'm sorry."

"A doctor," Hanzo insisted.

"Right," McCree sat forward, focusing suddenly. "A... doctor..."

The word came out thoughtfully enough that Hanzo shook off the last of his lingering memories of childhood and looked at McCree. Pay attention, he snarled at himself again.

"I'll talk to Reeha." McCree shifted uneasily. "We're shy on doctors. Most of us got training enough for basic stuff, anything worse isn't all that common really. Fareeha might be able to call in a favour. And if Reyes is going to be onboard... yeah, ok, I'll get you a doctor."

He didn't look happy about it. But there was a shady little tip to one eyebrow as he mentioned Reyes.

"Make the stops in Westport Junction and Timberwolf Falls. You have communication outside this train?" Hanzo's comm had been inactive inside the train.

McCree shook his head. "Not in the cars. There's lead in the walls and we're a far goddamn way out from the comm towers. Use the dome car, two that way," McCree cocked his head down the car. “It’s the only place you get reception.”

The rattle of the wheels as they went over a bridge made Hanzo look up. Outside the window, Hanzo could see the supports of a bridge flash past, then beyond was the wide open bowl of a valley, lashed with rain. There was another rattle of steel wheels on tracks and the train rushed back into the woods.

"What else?" McCree asked. "I hate to ask, since I can only assume it will mortally offend you, again, but are you alright? You went pretty white there."

“Fine,” Hanzo said flatly.

"Sure," McCree said, just as flat. "Alright. Your brother and commander, doctor. Anything else, anyone else?"

"Where are you taking us?" Hanzo asked the question he hadn't cared about before.

"You-- I thought," McCree apparently scrambled back on to the conversation after this unexpected bump. "I thought you'd know."

"I didn't think I'd get this far," Hanzo admitted.

"Oh," McCree looked at the table, his hands loose on the smooth wood. "Well then."

"Where?" Hanzo wished he hadn't said that.

"Old forest, past Timberwolf Falls," McCree at least answered promptly, "Old tracks but they're still technically used for freight. Mostly emergency supplies, but they're federally maintained. Got a few places to hide," he added, seeing Hanzo's face when McCree said 'federal', "I use these tracks, they're safe for running. Then off the main line and onto side cuts. There's rail beds all over the place that most people don't know about anymore, you know?"

Hanzo felt like they were on the verge of McCree launching into an animated lecture on the topic of North America's legacy of steel rail. He shot MCcree a pointed glare and that seemed to do the trick. McCree’s enthusiasm subsided and Hanzo felt a little guilty.

"Anyway,” McCree went on, clearing his throat, “I maintain the side cuts and they’re deep enough to hide, and most of them are listed as broken or impassable. Once we're out of the hills and forest, we go underground."

Hanzo’s knowledge of geography was meticulously detailed in many areas, mostly areas he'd used for stake outs and assassinations, but it was also broad enough to know that there was no tunnel that covered the entire plains. He said so.

"Who's running this train?" McCree said with a touch of asperity. "I'm telling you, a tunnel. My damn tunnel. So between federal lines, side cuts, and the tunnels, we're going south and west. I'm running for the gorge."

"Deadlock Gorge?" The words jerked out of Hanzo’s mouth and surprised him more than McCree.

"You know about it? Oh,Reyes, right," McCree glanced away. "Yes, the gorge."

"It was trashed," Hanzo said. "Reyes cleaned it out."

"Yes," McCree said, he kept his voice very calm, his eyes on his still hands on the table. "He did."

Something in his voice made Hanzo tighten his right hand again. Under the tight sleeve of his left arm, the dragons were restless.

"But that's it," McCree shrugged without moving his hands, or his gaze. "It's cleaned out. Everyone knows it's empty and a dead end. No one expects certainties to change."

Hanzo thought of the most successful smuggling operation in the entire world running on a three hundred year old train through a forest. A criminal agency probably worth billions kept on paper ledgers and by people in coveralls hunched over an abacus with a cat for company. Hanzo had been so sure their online security was decades ahead of his ability to track because he'd never seen Deadlock. It had never occurred to him to think McCree simply wasn't where he'd been looking.

"Very well," Hanzo conceded. If he couldn't have found Deadlock after two years, than his pride wouldn't allow him to think anyone else could do better.

McCree nodded. For the barest skip of a second, Hanzo saw a look of stark relief cross his face. "Trip'll take awhile, Adamant only goes about 200 km/h. But that just means anyone looking for you will assume you're well ahead of wherever we are. You know who’s hunting you?"

"Reyes would have a more comprehensive list," Hanzo said darkly. "PETRA has an agency for curbing anything related to Overwatch, they'll have people hunting for us. Reyes has an assassin after him, and--" Hanzo's voice hitched, his mind hitting a stumbling block he thought he'd destroyed years ago. "There's a... The Shimada Clan of Hanamura. They're hunting Genji."

"Just Genji? Not you?"

"It's not—" Hanzo shifted his weight restlessly, eyes tracking around the small cabin, then started again. "Members of the Shimada clan tried to kill Genji."

"Thought they were wiped out, fifteen years ago or something."

"Or something," Hanzo repeated, his voice sour. "Yes, I thought so, too. Certainties change, as you well know."

"And what kind of assassin arrives in a victim’s safe house and doesn't make a kill? Did Reyes kill him first?"

Hanzo shrugged, looking annoyed. "He didn't see fit to share that crucial information with me."

"Ah, there's that pride, sounds like Reyes," McCree nodded comfortably. "And you?"

"My brother was nearly killed," Hanzo said without much intonation. "And my entire organization was exposed."

"Sure," McCree nodded, he sat back, hat cocked up and hands relaxed on the little table before him. "Sure, but you mentioned all that. Ain't said what happened to you."

Hanzo broke eye contact first, looked out the window, past the scattered, horizontal lines of the rain. It was dark out there, but they were curving around the edge of a lake, the trees heavy and tall, leaning over the water on the lake shore across from them. It was fuzzy and soft with rain on the water.

"I'm here to smuggle you away," McCree said quietly. "Tell me who I'm smuggling you from."

Hanzo ran his right hand down his left arm, hardly noticing he was doing it. "Head hunter," Hanzo finally spoke after a pause that went too long. "Recruiter. Someone who hates that I’ve bought something so valuable to Blackwatch."

"Must be a valuable man to them?"

"They don't want me, specifically. They just want…” Hanzo trailed off. The heat under his left sleeve burned reassuring and fierce under his right palm.

"Well alright," McCree stood from the bench. "There's some clothes for you there. Might do to look like any of us around here. Not many people see us, old railways aren't so well noticed, but it could help. You do stand out, Hanzo, if you don't mind me saying."

Hanzo looked down at himself, then studied McCree, and tipped his head to one side in a tiny shrug of acceptance.

"Help yourself. There's hot water on in the cabin at the end of this car. There’ll be a spotter around, one of my people, I mean. I told them not to come in this car less they you tell them to, but one’s always posted as a runner in the office car."

Hanzo nodded, looking out the window again, and McCree glanced out just as they tipped away from the lake and dove back into the trees.

"You've got the run of the train; investigate how we live to your heart's content and let me know if there's something you need." McCree brushed past Hanzo on his way to the door.

"McCree," Hanzo was still staring out the window, still covering his left arm with his right hand. He had to pick his words carefully now, they had to be the right ones. "This isn't what I expected, but thank you."

"Sure," McCree said. He sounded startled. "We both got a shock, Hanzo, but I think we'll get by just fine."

Hanzo made no move, didn't speak, and kept himself turned away from McCree in a deliberate show of his back, looking out the window. McCree paused just on the edge of Hanzo's periphery, perfectly still, then nodded slowly. He drew back, slid the cabin door open in the silence, then shut it behind him.

Hanzo let out a breath that shook, and took a step back, then another, and then leaned his weight against the closed door. He sagged back into it, covered his face in both hands and tried desperately to keep his fear and fury and frustration from crawling up his throat to devour him.

It was only because he was so close to the door, only because he was quietly focusing on the silence in the space around the noise of the train, that he felt a thump on the door, almost exactly like someone leaning against it from the other side. Hanzo opened his eyes and held his breath, and he heard McCree in the hallway behind him.

"Well shit," McCree said very softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! The next chapter will be up September 25! I hope you're enjoying.  
> I'm on [Tumblr](http://leoandlancer.tumblr.com)! Come by and say hi if you're so inclined!  
> Artwork is by the amazing [Archivist](http://hellomynameisandiam.tumblr.com/)! They were my partner for the Big Bang and continue to be excellent =D


	4. It's Free Ammunition

Hanzo had expected Genji to laugh when he'd finished talking. He had been almost leaning into that expectation to break up Reyes' inevitable and perfectly legitimate arguments. Genji was quiet however, nothing but soft, bubbling breaths in the darkness of the truck and Hanzo was left holding onto his brother in the dark and feeling his blood cooling. Reyes sat quiet, for a while.

"Well," Reyes said into the darkness. "You're goddamn right. I hate the idea."

"Name a better one," Hanzo replied. His voice was soft and his attention was wandering.There was so much to think about now. So much that had gone wrong, could still go wrong.

"That didn't sound like a retort," Reyes said after a beat.

"It was a plea," Hanzo's fingers tightened around Genji's hand. Genji's grip had gone loose, but his fingers twitched against Hanzo's sometimes.

"Shit."

There was a scuffing sound in the dark as Reyes pulled his hat off, and scratched at the scars on the back of his neck.

"You wanted a way out,” Hanzo said, hating that this is what he’d been reduced to. “We’re in a _grocer’s truck_ , Reyes. We’re out of the city, but we need to stay ahead of everyone hunting us. We need a smuggler and a fighter, and we need to disappear."

"We need," Reyes broke off, another scuff of his hands over his head. "Fuck." He went on with more feeling. “You spent two years looking for Deadlock. The hell makes you think you can find them now?”

“I found them,” Hanzo said, and felt robbed. Two years of hunting, and then Deadlock had turned up as though by accident. “I found them last night.”

The silence that Reyes cultivated slowly turned cold.

They sat bumping and swaying in the back of the transport truck, listening to the hum of the engine, the newspaper sliding over the metal floor everytime they took a corner.

"Hanzo," Reyes said quietly into the darkness, "this is best answer you've come up with yet but I have to tell you, going to Deadlock is a cold hard fuck up."

 

* * *

 

They stopped briefly in Russet.

The train station had long collapsed in on itself, the roof open to the sky, the wide overhanging eaves crumpled, the cement platform cracked and sprouting a flourishing ecosystem all its own. Hanzo climbed down from the car and stood on the platform anyway, and heard McCree step cautiously down after him. A few people bundled in coats against the chill of the evening picked their way out of the forest, hauling a few crates between them.

“Onboard," McCree cocked his head down the train.

The storage car had a side door, and Hanzo, watched as McCree’s delivery of dubious ownership was loaded.

“Munitions?” Hanzo asked.

“Dry goods,” McCree replied. “We go through a lot of oats and flour on this train.”

The people who’d made the grocery run nodded to McCree and left without speaking. McCree’s spotters were handily dragging the crates into the storage car. It was quick, efficient, and Hanzo seethed inwardly at how impossible what he’d just seen would be to track.

Hanzo turned, already thinking ahead to Westport Junction and wanting to get underway again. McCree was in his way on the stairs to the car, leaning out to look down the platform to watch his spotters lock the storage car, thoughtlessly holding him up.

Hanzo paused for half a heartbeat, then remembered Genji was hurt and waiting for him. That pushed Hanzo into motion. He reached out and bodily picked McCree up and carried him up the stairs. He dumped McCree back down on the platform and pushed brusquely past him into the car again.

"We need to move."

"Hanzo," McCree sounded winded, standing in the door with one hand on his hat and the other flat on his chest. “You do know that I am…”

Hanzo turned back to glare at the leader of Deadlock. McCree was comfortably within Hanzo’s capability to lift and was shortly going to be tested for his viability as a thrown object.  

McCree showed some of his remarkable survival instincts, shut his mouth and turned to walk away from Hanzo into the car ahead of them without another word.

It was dim and warm in the war car, and Hanzo felt somehow at home surrounded by the maps and paper and cards and books of an organization. There was an assurance to the structure around him, and certainty to the order apparent in the labels and cats-cradles and playing cards on the window. It was a good place to collect his scattered compossure and correct his posture and remember that Genji would be fine.

It reminded him of how Reyes organized his work.

A jolt went through the floor as the massive engine jerked and shuddered forward. The low roar that seemed to be the perpetual mode of conversation for the machine rose until the car lurched under Hanzo's feet again. The oil lamps swung in their battered metal cages. The glass around the flames was thick and irregular, and the light came off in bars, like he was underwater.

In the swinging, dim light of the cabin, Hanzo crossed his arms and held his left bicep with his right hand and looked up at the spread of playing cards and coloured string over one window.

He'd found his own name on the King of Diamonds early, Genji's name written on the Jack of Clubs beside him, Reyes on the Ace of Clubs above them both. They were all wrapped in black string, a few cards taped below them, false identities and a few of his operatives, one or two of his spies, or Genji’s.

There was a constellation of cards tied in purple string, headed by the Queen of Spades with _Sombra?????_ in purple marker. Another system in blue, simple, with a wide open space beside it, suggesting McCree had been expecting more from them. The Ace of Spades with _Jack_ , and the Ace of Hearts with _Ana_. Both names in blue, both written with neat, small capital letters.

There was a thread between the three Aces of Reyes, Ana, and Jack, and Hanzo considered the little triangle it made. He wondered who the hell Jack and Ana were, and what they meant to Reyes. There were a lot of threads on this constellation that led to or from Reyes. More than Hanzo could guess at, and almost none of them were familiar.

Hanzo let his eyes slide out of focus, staring through the window of the car as the train swayed on its tracks, pulling westward through the rain. The clouds were heavy overhead, but there was enough light to pick out the trees, the coarse underbrush. Hanzo looked out at the trees as they swept past him, and caught a flash of startling colour that made him blink. There was a gash in the clouds, and golden light from the setting sun was making a tear in the grey world rampant with warm light and fire-edged gold in the clouds. The rain lit up where it fell past.

Then the train ran on into the forest, and trees swallowed the light again. Hanzo blinked, and found himself looking at his own reflection in the glass between the cards. He found a tired, worried, furious-looking man, holding his left arm as if it were broken.

He shut his eyes and forced a breath out.

"Well, that wasn't easy."

McCree's voice made Hanzo sway upright, turning to face the man as he stepped in through the upper door.

“Reeha just heard back from her uh… From the doctor I was talking about. It’s arranged. We’ll stop in Timberwolf Station for them and then we’ll run.” McCree shook a few drops of rain off his hat and shoved it back over his hair, cocking his head to look at Hanzo. "How’d you make do these last days without a doctor? You said your brother was hurt pretty badly.”

"Our healer left us just enough keep Genji alive," Hanzo said sourly. The moment when he'd carried Genji into Moira's laboratory and found it quiet and empty was one that would wake him in the nights to come. If he lived through many of them. Moira had left no note, just a single chance to keep Genji from dying.

"Uh huh," McCree said, sensing some story here that he wisely wished to avoid. Good survival instincts again. "Well, Reeha's got a contact who'll be able to help us. She uh..." McCree broke off, glanced at the window and the cat's cradle of cards and string behind Hanzo and made a face. "She hates me," he said with deliberate care, "so I'm not sure how much of bedside manner to expect but..."

Hanzo had stopped listening after the admission. "Really?"

"What?" McCree had still been talking, but curtailed it respectfully as Hanzo cut across him.

"You're calling on a doctor who hates you to come here?"

"I'm already making a deal with an assassin that's been hunting me for two years," McCree said, exasperation showing in the uneasy shifting of his shoulders. "And I'm taking on his commander, who has wanted me dead for over fifteen years. One more person on my train that hates my guts is hardly a stretch."

"And why does she hate you?" Hanzo asked, unsure if he was fishing for the information out of force of habit or just legitimate curiosity.

Another shift of McCree's shoulders, uncertainty and hesitation. "Ask Reyes."

"He tells me very little," Hanzo said.

McCree grinned, and stepped up beside him to look at the playing cards and their net of string. "Really? You ask many questions of him?"

Hanzo opened his mouth. Shut it again, and frowned. "No."

Questioning Reyes wasn't something that had ever occurred to him.

"No wonder he likes you. I wasn't suited to him at all." McCree idly pulled a deck of cards from his pocket, looked at it, and began cutting and shuffling the deck one handed. "Reyes likes being the one who’s got all the answers, and hates giving out more than he needs to. Or he was like that when I knew him. Guess things are different now."

"What did you do to him?" Hanzo's voice surprised him. The question came out with the memory of coffee on the rooftop, of the image of Reyes looking terrified with a shattered mug at his feet. He was watching McCree's gloved hand shuffling the cards.

"Did you ask Reyes?"

"I'm asking you."

McCree clenched his hand around the deck, and abruptly, the cards were ordered into a neat stack again.

The train found a corner and leaned into it, and Hanzo had to focus for a moment to find his balance. When he had, McCree was leaning comfortably into the movement of the train, natural as if he'd been born on the rails, and his shoulder just touched  Hanzo's.

"Let him down," McCree said quietly. "I wasn't right, that's all. I wasn't suited for the chance he gave me. Wasn't ready for it. Wasn't... wasn't a good pick. He made a mistake when he saw me and pulled me up by the scruff of the neck. He's got a soft spot for strays, you ever notice that?"

Hanzo had a sudden sick memory of the last time he'd carried Genji anywhere. Ten years ago with his brother still shy of his last growth spurt in his arms. Desperate and furious and bloody with only the clothes on their back and stolen, ancestral weapons strapped to them. Gabriel Reyes had been exactly where he'd promised to be. He'd done exactly what he'd promised Hanzo he would do. Reyes had been better than his word and had saved them. It had worked, mostly.

Strays. Hanzo wondered how many more strays Reyes had, or would have, taken in if he'd had the chance.

"Doctor's meeting us at Timberwolf." McCree said, accepting Hanzo's silence. "Your brother going to make it ok?"

"Yes," Hanzo replied without thinking. The alternative wasn't worth thinking about.

“Hanzo," McCree said, and it sounded almost kindly, and then McCree seemed to pull back a little, aware that he might be perilously close to overstepping. "You know what you want to do after we reach Deadlock Gorge?”

"I..." Hanzo paused. Words didn't often come easy to him. Words were something he used like tools; he couldn't play with his thoughts aloud like Genji could. He looked back at the window, but it was full dark out, and the soft golden light of the lamps just showed him his own reflection, standing next to the man he should have been arresting. "I don't know," he said flatly.

"Give it some thought," McCree said, "Once we have your brother. Westport's in two hours."

Right. His brother. Someone who relied on him. He nodded as a headache rose hot and merciless behind his eyes.

"Then maybe find some sleep," McCree went on, "or at least sit down a spell. Before you fall down."

The door of the car slid open for a moment, and cool, damp evening air rushed in and ruffled the papers on the tables, flapping the cards against the glass. Then McCree slid the door shut again, and Hanzo was alone.

 

* * *

 

Genji was on his feet, and all alone, when Hanzo stepped down on to the cement platform of Westport Junction. They were among trees so tall the sky was only a little window above them and Genji was grinning in the dark, one arm curled protectively over his stomach.

Hanzo walked directly up to his brother without pause and hugged him, and let out a long breath when Genji leaned his head heavily on Hanzo's shoulder and muttered, "Reyes is being insufferable. I can't wait for you to babysit him a while."

"Where is he?"

"He seems to know the leader of this gang? Probably hunting him down now to give him some fresh hell."

Hanzo pulled back, looking at Genji as best as he could in the darkness. The trees were high black towers all around them, and the sky was dark navy shot with clouds scudding fast over the stars. They had outrun the rain half an hour ago, and it was chasing them now. The trees hushed in warning for it. The only light came from the windows of the train cars, golden panels of light in the darkness, and Genji stared past Hanzo in frank astonishment.

"I'll be honest," he said, as Hanzo held him up. "When you sent us the pick up location I had no earthly idea what kind of transport could come to a two hundred-year-old train station. A two hundred-year-old train," he grunted as he tried to shift his weight to walk again, "did not occur to me."

"If it helps," Hanzo offered, still looking around for Reyes, "I did punch the gang's leader when I saw it."

Genji gave a bark of laughter that nearly doubled him over in pain. "Don't..." he gasped, grinning. "Oh fuck, don't make me laugh."

"There will be a doctor at the next station."

"Seriously? Someone is actually helping this outfit out?"

"Aside from me? Yes. I was surprised." Hanzo curled his arm a little more protectively under Genji's shoulders as he helped his brother to the train. The forest was a dark hush all around them; they were at the bottom of a black well of trees with the clouds crawling over the stars above them. The train snarled in its traces ahead of them, the cars with the long gold windows.

The hush of the trees dropped around them as the wind died and in the sudden silence, Hanzo heard the distinctly inorganic noise of metal sliding over metal.

Genji went still in his arms.

"Were you followed?"

"We didn't think so," Genji spoke as softly as Hanzo. "We've been waiting here alone for an hour, Hanzo. Why wouldn't..."

The crash of a shotgun split the night so effectively Hanzo and Genji both flinched. Above them, a hundred sleeping birds in the trees woke up and screamed.

"Damn." Genji's hand went to his sword, but he wasn't wearing it, his injured chest and gut gone hard and shuddering with tension. He tucked himself against Hanzo, unarmed and injured and totally trusting that his big brother could handle this for both of them.

Something dark was moving in the trees, a faint flicker of light that flashed blue when sharpened steel arced around fast enough Hanzo could hear it slice the air.

Swords that looked like Genji's.

Hanzo swore with a fury that came straight from terror and scooped Genji up in the same moment as the crack of a pistol echoed out from the forest.

Curled up and snarling with pain in his arms, Genji clung to his brother, tucked in on himself and Hanzo felt the rush of fresh blood on his front. Genji's barely closed wounds were open again, and Hanzo swore in a fresh stream as he jumped up the steps to the car in one bound and in through a sliding door that was ripped open from the inside.

One of McCree's spotters was in the train car, holding the door for them with a evil looking shotgun under one arm and an expression of grim readiness. It took Hanzo a beat to realize they were in the cabin car, two more of McCree's spotters crouched under the window, both with pistols at the ready.

"Here, Hanzo!" Reeha held the door open to one of the empty cabins.

There was a military issue rocket launcher held over her arm. Hanzo stared at it for a heartbeat. It looked as sleek and shiny in incongruous as a cobra among the soft, torn edges of McCree's second in command. Reeha had her hair tied back and braided and the cat Azizi stood arched and tense at her feet. Hanzo only had one glimpse before he dove past and eased Genji down into the ready bed box. His brother was white faced and glassy eyed with pain, but he caught Hanzo's eye and gave him a nod.

"Ok," he breathed, "go help Reyes."

"You go," Hanzo rounded on Reeha who stood like a sentinel in the door.

"I can't see in the dark so I can't fly," Reeha replied flatly, and, to Hanzo's ears, nonsensically. "McCree said you can see at least. Go, I can watch the car. Jesse's out there and I heard Gabe. Go help them. Go!" This last was shouted because Hanzo turned on her, his mouth open slightly.

Someone was darting through the carriage, yanking the wicks of the lanterns down low, making the inside of the cars dark. It was hard to judge what Reeha's expression was, but Hanzo felt Genji's hand on his tighten.

"Go," Genji hissed. "Get Reyes, and we need this McCree guy for the train, right? Go."

Genji sounded like a boy when he spoke Japanese. He'd stopped speaking it when they left Japan, and now only used his mother tongue when he needed Hanzo to listen to him.

"Do not let him come to harm," Hanzo snarled to Reeha.

Stormbow left his back, and he pulled it free as he let Genji's hand slip out of his, then darted past Reeha as she nodded.

Outside, the world was a dark blur, the train's lights gone so low that they couldn't show more than the bare squares of where the windows were. Hanzo nocked a sonic arrow, drew it back, and fired it into the heart of the the broken down train station.

The world went red. Black trees in the dark night with the clouds rolling in, and the trees behind the train station were heavy with the red outlines of waiting killers, poised, watching.

Hanzo stopped, mouth slightly open and eyes wide because that was too many, far too many for this.

Reyes's shotguns cracked out from inside the tree line, and there was a pistol making short, business-like retorts. Too far away. The figures in the trees over the train station leaned forward from their branches, and lunged down towards Hanzo as one.

Hanzo spared a thought for Reyes, who liked a short range fight he could initiate from some advantageously overlooked hiding place. And Genji, who preferred to hunt and kill his targets from unexpected angles. Hanzo liked to perch somewhere, line up a shot, and be done with it. He had never had to deal with a squadron of airborne ninjas dive bombing him from the trees. He wondered how the hell McCree fought, and remembered that single, heavy looking pistol on his hip. The red outlines were almost close enough Hanzo could see them without the sonic arrow’s help. Dark shapes in the open air, with fine blue edges where the swords they carried swept down before them.

Hanzo stood alone on the cracked cement of the platform while twelve assassins plunged down from the trees towards him, swords leading, ready for him to dodge.

Hanzo's arrow made a silken, metallic sound as the arrow head clicked open, the pale light glinted blue on its many edges.

A hail of shuriken struck him, tiny metal teeth biting in a dozen places over his chest and shoulders, and Hanzo bit back the pain and timed his shot, kept tension humming on the string, then tipped the arrow down and fired when the killers in black were close enough to touch.

"Scatter."

The arrow head exploded at his feet, richochetting up in a storm of lethal metal shards. Hanzo jumped backwards, turned and caught the windowsill of the train car with one hand before the first of the assassins had met with the jagged hail of the scatter arrow.

Another eight seconds on the sonic arrow; that meant another eighteen before he could fire it again. Hanzo alighted on the rounded roof of the train car. Below him, twelve assassins in the dark air four feet above the platform were descending into an expanding storm of razor-edged shrapnel. Hanzo pulled a new arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, and took aim.

He had seconds to make a difference in this fight. Seconds because he was a sniper; he liked his distance and they would know that. They could climb as well as he could, and if they swarmed him, he wouldn’t last long. He had seconds before they could react, find him, close distance.

Hanzo killed one assassin before they'd even touched the ground. The arrow went through the head and Hanzo didn't need a full draw before he loosed the next arrow, and the next—they were close enough he didn’t need the power of a full draw.

Three dead on the train platform, Genji lying bleeding and hurt somewhere under his feet. Reyes' shotguns spoke in brief bursts of two or three shots at a time, making the air shake. The pistol was closer now; Hanzo hadn't realized how much deeper in the forest it had been, but the echo wasn't so muffled. Six shots almost on top of each other, and a pause.

Nine—Hanzo released another arrow—eight injured but hale assassins hit the train platform in a crouch and looked up at him. Hanzo could just see them, dressed in black with muddy orange armor, a faintly circular crest on their shoulders.

The crest. Hanzo felt a searing pain over the curve of his right shoulder. The crest of two dragons, chasing each other’s tails to form a ring.

Hanzo loosed the next arrow with more violence than he needed to and barely managed to realize his mistake. The ninja he'd shot at had swung their sword up, deflecting the arrow back, and Hanzo had to dodge sideways to get out of its way. He was fighting the soldiers of his own clan. People who had been trained by the same teachers that had taken Hanzo and Genji under their expertise and made killers of them. He was fighting eight versions of his little brother.

There was a flash of red in the edge of his sonic arrow's range. More killers in the trees, jumping easily, staying above the ground and gathering themselves to pounce down into the empty platform.

Hanzo sighted, drew back and fired twice. Two assassins were in mid flight, arcing gracefully from tree to platform when the arrows took them.

One benefit of fighting people trained like Genji was they acted like Genji. So predictable.

The sounds of Reyes' shotguns and the six shooter were close now, and Hanzo could hear the bark of Reyes' voice in the trees, McCree's voice snarling back at him. Hanzo couldn't have cared less about what they spoke of. He drew and fired down at the ninja who looked towards the train car’s entryway. This one did not deflect the arrow in time and died quietly.

"Reeha!" McCree's voice rose over the snarling argument he and Reyes had been having. “Little help over--”

"You brought Fareeha into this?!"

Reyes' roar was so furious Hanzo momentarily dropped his guard. The last time Reyes had sounded that angry he'd destroyed a not insubstantial portion of Victoria's historical property in a quarter hour long rampage. Hanzo wasn't sure how well McCree's train would fare.

"She came and found _me_! She tagged after _me_!" McCree yelled back, just as angry. "Like she always does! I'm trying to—"

"Enough!" Hanzo roared out towards the argument. He had fired four arrows in the last few seconds and only two had hit, and only one was fatal. Apparently, the Shimada clan was perfectly aware of Hanzo's new weapon proficiency and had trained their assassins accordingly. "Both of you! McCree's lieutenant is guarding Genji!"

"I can't believe you'd put her in danger," Reyes snarled. He emptied both shotguns up into the trees and the shells clattered as they hit the cement. A few bodies thudded to the ground in his wake.

" _I_ put her in danger? You're the one who blew up her home base!" McCree was angry now, really angry, his voice just as deep and just as ugly as Reyes’.

Hanzo couldn't see them; it was dark on the platform and the low light from the train cars only showed the assassins by the edges of their swords.

The clouds were covering the stars again, the storm catching up to them. The rising wind smelled like fresh rain and cracked pine. In the darkness, Hanzo felt a dip in the wind on one side of him. He loosed an arrow far too early, and brought Stormbow up with a desperate instinct just in time to catch the back of a sword before it could be pulled taught against his throat.

"Both of you shut up," Hanzo grunted in exertion, wrenched the assassin over his shoulder and used the bow as leverage to hurl him hard and fast and mean into the darkness over the train platform. "Reyes, end this!"

"McCree," Reyes snarled. Hanzo could hear him in the darkness, heavy boots and the clatter of his shotguns as he threw them aside to draw fresh ones.

"Hanzo! Look up!" McCree called, and Hanzo was about to bark back at him to tell him to shut the hell up when several tiny but significant parts of his mind took control of his idiot body. He looked up as McCree called, "Now hold on," with enough politeness that Hanzo was momentarily taken aback.

He was still looking up at the dark sky when bright white fire exploded briefly below him. The undersides of the tree branches in a full ring around the little platform were lit suddenly in stark black and white, and a noise like god's own gavel coming down made him flinch.

When the darkness slammed back in, it felt like Hanzo could breathe again, and he looked down with his night vision more or less intact to discover the dazed shapes of a platform crowded with his kin's private army. A private army of killers and Reyes, racing in among them in his black coat with both shotguns held up.

Then Reyes began to turn, one shotgun leading into a spin and Hanzo crouched instinctively, even though he was well safe on the roof, and Reyes' ally besides. He watched as Reyes' outline blurred, became invisible in the darkness, and the low light gleamed on the edges of the twin shotguns as they split, and then there were four, six shotguns in a spinning circle.  Reyes looked huge in the centre of a whirl of blasting hellfire. Cold air billowed out from around him, " _Die Die Die!_ " snarled out with heartfelt sincerity.

Whatever the Shimada clan had prepared this team for, Reyes didn't factor into it. They died clustered together on the train platform, some barely managing to get their swords up in defense. It was useless, in the end.

McCree stood well back from the destruction, reloading his six shooter, staring at Reyes, barely visible in the low light from the train. Silence fell, as dying people dropped their swords and shuriken clattered over the platform like lost change. Reyes' steps slowed, his coat swung around him as he stopped, and he dropped his spent shotguns.

Silence fell on the platform, and for a moment, no one moved. Hanzo could just hear himself, Reyes, and McCree catching their breath.

Hanzo slowly drew the string of his bow back, an arrow already nocked. No one moved on the platform, and he was perfectly hidden in the dark above the train. The wind hushed in the high trees, Reyes drew new shotguns, and McCree held his six-shooter in one hand and rubbed his face with the other.

Hanzo didn’t breathe as he brought the arrow up, pulled it slowly around, and took sight on McCree.

The silence broke as Reyes cursed quietly, and began picking his way through the drifts of dead assassins.

Let go, Hanzo thought, McCree could have died just as easily in this fight. Reyes can talk his way through anything. He already knows Reeha.

McCree was casting around, looking for something, more and more urgently, he took a step forward and his movements were getting faster, more alarmed. He looked up at the train roof and somehow in the darkness, saw Hanzo. For a moment, his shoulders dropped the six shooter eased down a fraction and the look of stark relief on his face meant McCree had thought Hanzo was dead or gone.

The wind rushed high in the tops of the trees and Hanzo couldn’t breathe. McCree looked at the the drawn bow and the arrow aimed right through him and froze, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

Let go, Hanzo snarled inside the privacy of his own mind.

McCree stood perfectly still, eyes wide.

Three red outlines of assassin showed up on the edge of his sonic arrow's periphery, all drawing swords, all wounded, all trying to run. Hanzo gave a low, snarl that came from the depths of his soul and tipped the arrow around, fired, and drew again. McCree moved in the same instant and brought his pistol around to bare. They both fired at the same time, hit the same assassin who fell with an arrow in their skull and a bullet in their chest. And the third assassin, wounded and moving fast and alone suddenly, turned a retreat into a sprint, and fled gracelessly out of the range of the sonic arrow.

Silence fell briefly, Hanzo could hear his heart hammering against his ribs, hear Reyes swearing as he picked his way through the dead, and hear the wind in the trees.

Then McCree criede out in alarm. Hanzo heard the soft noise of a sword swinging up fast, and before he even knew what was happening, drew another arrow as something gave a metallic _clang_ to wake the dead.

One of the assassins on the platform was only playing dead and had struck up with his drawn sword in an arc that could cut McCree in half. The sword should have cut him open from hip to rib, and for a moment, Hanzo’s heart skipped a beat, then realized what he was seeing.

McCree was holding the edge of the sword on his arm in a perfect guard. Left arm, left hand clenched in a fist in its glove, and the blue steel of the Shimada sword helplessly frozen against it. McCree snarled a curse and pulled his six shooter around to fire. The luckless assassin died with an arrow through his chest instead.

"We need to get moving," Reyes growled, watching the last assassin go down with visible disgust. "Jesse, you goddamn sentimental..."

Reyes was cut off as a light shower of shuriken fired out of the wall of trees around him. The back of his long coat was suddenly studded in glinting silver.

Hanzo had seconds more before he could fire another sonic arrow, while the one on the station platform was still active, showing nothing but darkness.

He drew another arrow and held it ready to fire as he felt blood trickle down his arms. The shuriken didn't hurt anymore, and he was used to them, but the wounds were always bloody.

The hush of the forest around them rose as a spatter of raindrops fell over the platform.

“Sounds about right, let's get a move on,” McCree shook his left arm, flexing his gloved hand as he picked his way through the dead on the platform towards the train.

Hanzo eased his bow down, then dropped off the rounded roof to the platform. The attack had taken much less than a minute. A few more shuriken glinted as they whirred out of the darkness around them, and Reyes, McCree and Hanzo all hissed in pain.

Still more in the darkness, but they wouldn't group again, they wouldn't try to engage where Reyes could reach them, where Hanzo could make them visible or McCree could stun them to immobility. Yet Hanzo, McCree and Reyes were open targets by the train, and it took many fewer shuriken than one might think to kill someone.

"Hanzo," Reyes growled, shotguns still held in both hands. "You breathing?"

Hanzo didn't bother to answer, just jumped up the entrance to the train car and yanked the sliding door open.

"Great. McCree?"

"I'm surprised you'd ask," McCree was behind them, climbing up after Reyes, and called ahead into the car. "Keep watch, we might have picked up a few stowaways. Get this doggy moving."

"You actually have people? Great help they were," Reyes snarled.

"They guard the train, Reyes," McCree growled at him as they jostled into the cabin car one after another. "I don't use everything I've learned from you. I'm careful about my people's safety. They stay where there's cover and protect what we have."

Reyes was already snarling out a reply when Hanzo shoved his way into Genji's room and was brought up short by the unlovely view down the muzzle of a rocket launcher pointed directly into his face.

"Oh, you," Reeha lowered the launcher, causing Hanzo’s heart to restart. "Tell your brother to stay in his box. Oh, Gabe!" This last word was spoken an octave higher, and much more happily as she perked up and beamed past Hanzo’s shoulder.

"You're a mess; are you ok?" Genji said without preamble. He was sitting up in bed, both hands shaking on the blankets and waxy in the low light. Azizi the cat was beside him, butting her face against Genji’s to no effect whatever.

"Fine," Hanzo said, discarding any emotional toll of the death of perhaps twenty of their kin in the darkness just outside. "Get down. You're hurt."

"So are you.” Genji retorted.

McCree heard a fluid burst of Arabic behind him from Reeha, and ignored it when McCree replied.

“Reyes looks like dog food,” Genji’s eyes were on whatever was going on behind Hanzo, “Anyway, where's our host? This Deadlock leader we've been hunting." Genji stubbornly did not lie down.

"Fine, thanks for askin'," McCree was in the doorway, coming no closer but smiled at Genji and lifted a hand to tip his hat. "You must be Genji. Real nice to meet you."

Genji stared at him. Slightly longer than was polite. "You're the leader of the Deadlock gang?"

"Seems that's still the case, yeah." McCree went to work pulling shuriken off his arms and shoulders like burrs.

One of those arms could block a _sword,_ Hanzo reminded himself. That had to wait, he had his brother back now.

Genji stared for another beat of silence, then turned his gaze to Hanzo and spoke in rapid Japanese. "Brother, you could you have warned me about this. I wasn't expecting this, who is this hobo, this man looks like he's been dragged backwards through a hedge."

Hanzo was about to tell Genji to use English and some manners, then froze as McCree spoke first.

"Also, point of order, he speaks Japanese," McCree remarked amiably in their first language. "Fair's fair. Make yourself at home, Genji, we're picking up a doc in a few hours. Hold tight until then."

There was a pause and Hanzo assumed McCree was nodding to both of them. If he did, Hanzo didn't notice, he had his eyes closed under the flat of his hand.

"Idiot," Hanzo muttered when it was quiet.

"I was expecting someone marginally more frightening," Genji said, unabashed. "He looks like he went to school in a one room school house on the edge of a prairie. He looks like he carried his lunch in a tin bucket and rode the mule in bad weather. How was I supposed to know he spoke more than the native dialect?"

"Because I trained him," Reyes growled. He stuck his head in the door, past Reeha, who was grinning. "I've only taken on one idiot in my life, Genji, and that was because his brother insisted on it."

"It was kind of me to bring Hanzo along, I know." Genji dropped down at last on his pillows with a grunt. Azizi attempted to lie down on his face. “Get off me I’m injured.”

Hanzo glanced back out at Reyes, but he just shrugged, and Reeha's smile was real. They were standing together in the hall, Reeha's launcher over one shoulder.

"Fareeha Amari was my sister-in-arm's daughter," Reyes said briefly to Hanzo. His voice was still a growl but Hanzo was familiar with the lexicon of Reyes' growls, and this one was soft. "Reeha, my lieutenant Hanzo. You met Genji."

"We met," Reeha nodded to Hanzo, more polite than she had been when it was only McCree introducing them. "Gabe was my babysitter," she said happily, and apparently enjoyed the look that must have crossed Hanzo's face.

"Thank you," Hanzo heard himself say it to Reeha with real sincerity. "For watching over my brother."

"Of course," Reeha smiled. "Thank you for watching over mine."

Hanzo blinked, freezing up for a moment, remembering McCree, held at the point of his arrow while Reeha stayed here. He nodded a little awkwardly, and Reyes and Reeha moved off a little down the hallway. Hanzo slid Genji's door quietly shut.

"You're really keeping McCree alive?" Genji spoke very quietly in the silence that followed. Not even Reyes could have heard him through the door

"For now," Hanzo said.

"You said you suckerpuched him?"

"I did."

"Well. Great start."

Hanzo didn't dignify that, and pulled a four point blanket over his brother, like they were both twenty years younger and it was Hanzo’s sworn duty to tuck his baby brother in at night. Genji huffed out a sigh and relaxed by inches, trying to come to some sort of peace with the pain in his gut. Azizi the cat curled herself into the crook of Genji’s shoulder, turned until her butt was pressed to Genji’s cheek and began purring.

Hanzo pet the cat, trying to stifle his smile as Genji watched him, dour under the waxiness of his skin.Occasionally, the noise of the wheels clattered up to them from the tracks, or a tree branch would brush down the length of the train. Azizi purred as she slowly kneaded Genji’s collar bone with a mitt-full of needles. Hanzo tried to think of nothing. Genji slipped into a doze, his breath ragged and shallow. Reyes’ voice carried a little way down the car, talking with Reeha; both voices raised in laughter at times.

“You ever heard Reyes laugh?” Genji’s voice was drowsy, but it was enough to bring Hanzo out of the quiet numbness he’d let spread over him.

“No, not like that.”

“He didn’t know she was here, did he. It’s like McCree’s lieutenant is his goddaughter.”

“No. They likely have a great deal to discuss.”

He heard laughter again, some shared joke, Reeha seeing a side of his commander Hanzo didn’t think could exist. He expected to feel some kind of resentment, or even distaste, but he just felt grateful, and happy somehow that Reyes, at least, had a reason to laugh.

The train's growl turned to a roar at some point, and they picked up speed, the train taking less corners than it had been. Out of the highlands, Hanzo guessed, now they were probably just cutting through vast forests left abandoned since the first Omnic war.

Hanzo didn’t remember dozing off, but woke with a start when the cabin door slid open.

"Hanzo, you should know. Moira's not coming back," Reyes said without another greeting as he let himself it.

Hanzo nodded, then paused when he saw Genji looking at Reyes with a sleepy but more than slightly wicked expression.

"Save it," Reyes said, catching the look apparently just as Hanzo looked up to him, mouth open, already framing a question. "Reeha was a baby girl when I was working with her mother."

"She adores you,” Genji said with a touch of asperity. "I can't think why, but she does. She was worried about you in the fight out there. What happened?"

"Thirty odd Shimada ninjas using the trees to try and pick us off," Reyes grumbled. "I was having a frank exchange of ideas with McCree when they made themselves known." He peeled off his trenchcoat and shook it. There was a clatter as several shuriken fell to the floor. "Hanzo you got a little..." Reyes started, gesturing at him.

Hanzo turned slightly to one side, clenched his teeth, and Reyes helpfully yanked three shuriken out of his shoulder. He hadn’t noticed them.

"Free ammo," Genji muttered happily, eyeing the glittering floor. The movement of the train was making the metal shudder across the floor.

"They were trying to get into the car," Hanzo said, remembering the way they'd clustered under the car where Genji was. "They're trying to kill you."

"Flattering. I appreciate your brotherly protection."

"They left the forest, stopped messing with us when they attacked you, Hanzo. It was good you got Genji inside in time."  Reyes pulled his coat back on, and dropped down to sit in the corner bench, arms reaching out and resting on either side of the bench back. "We might have picked up a few, there was more than enough time to crawl in under us. McCree’s people are checking that though."

"If they did crawl on, we might not have to worry about them sabotaging the tracks up ahead." Genji yawned as he spoke. “They won't risk killing their own in a fiery train crash.”

Reyes and Hanzo took a moment to consider this terrifying possibility.

"Shit," Reyes said softly. "I told you, I _told you,_ Hanzo, trusting McCree is a cold hard fuck up."

"You were the fuck up." Hanzo replied without thinking, his mouth moving before he realized what he was saying. "You left me to solve this and I am. You take issue, you don't have to be here."

The cabin fell into perfect, untroubled silence. The chiming of bloody shuriken on the floor barely registered. Even Genji was quiet.

Hanzo didn't look at Reyes, didn't speak, but stood after another moment. He tapped his little brother on the head in parting, then slid the cabin door open again.

"I mean," Genji said as he shut it behind him, "you both bring up some valid points."

Reyes swore, the cursing muffled by the closed door and the widening distance, and probably, though Hanzo wasn't sure, Reyes shoving his face in his hands.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! The next chapter will be posted on Oct 2, next week, I hope you enjoy!  
> If you have any questions, or requests, you can get in touch with me at [my Tumblr](http://leoandlancer.tumblr.com), thanks for stopping by <3


	5. Solitude is Hard to Find

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is late I have no excuse I just flippin forgot to post it. (≖͞_≖̥)

McCree didn’t flee. He was a tactical man with a tactical mind, and therefore he made a strategic retreat. There was a difference, and his pride could handle one more than the other. He left Hanzo with his brother and Reeha with Reyes and hoped to god he’d wake up if he fell asleep. Hoped they wouldn’t just mutiny because that would be the end of him.

He lit the lamps in the garden car when he arrived. It was warm, the shadows were leafy green, and it was far enough back on the train that no one would wander in here. At least, not until cook came looking for anything that wasn't starch or meat. He pulled his hat off in the quiet, letting the trailing ends of vines catch his hair as he ducked under them.

The seedling table was crowded with his latest project. He jealously guarded one bin of the garden for his own use, and was making the most of it. He’d started flowers there, and as they bloomed and died off, he replaced them. He barely ever learned the names of what he planted. Whenever Adamant could stop, McCree would find a farmer’s market and charm his way into paying half the price for bulbs and seeds or cuttings from whatever he liked. Almost everything he tried grew in here. It was one of his few times his success hadn’t come at the cost of guilt.

One of the seedlings in the tray was bullying up, big and wide, spreading greedily over the others. McCree had long discarded the tags identifying which seeds would bear what flowers, but he knew a hog when he saw one. He fetched down a pot, pulled up a three legged stool, and sat down beside the little pot bellied stove to work.

The door at the head of the car slammed open, and whoever was coming in apparently was still making up their mind about it, because it stayed open. Cold air blew through the vines and forests of peppers and tomatoes, and ruffled McCree’s hair.

"Shut the damn door,” he called, not looking up from his transplanting.

The door snapped shut, and for a moment, McCree thought whoever it was had stayed outside, and left McCree to himself again. Then he heard a rustle of the hanging vines, and listened a little more carefully. Barely any footfalls; McCree couldn’t hear anyone breathing.

McCree realized the hair on the back of his neck had bristled up, and that alone told him who was coming towards him. He gave a low groan and looked at the seedling table in front of him. His hat to one side, a dozen tiny green plants eagerly seeking towards the sun, this little bully of a plant in a handful of dirt on his palm.

Not bad, as last sights went.

"Oh," Hanzo’s voice, sounding slightly bewildered. Not much like an assassin, though admittedly, it wasn’t a lot to go on.

McCree sat up a little, and turned, his back to the little stove, and looked up at Hanzo. He was standing with his head slightly tipped to the side, the back of one hand gently holding up a curtain of cherry tomato vines. He looked like he’d never seen a garden in his life, or at least, not one in such a small space, or one so verdant it could almost be described as _loud_.

Hanzo’s eyes flicked to the door beside and a little behind McCree, and for a moment, McCree really wished Hanzo would just keep walking.

The train went around a bend in the track, and the plants in their baskets swayed slightly, the shadows of flowers and vines swayed sleepy and slow over his face. For a moment, the leaves parted and a triangle of light from between the leaves tracked over Hanzo’s cheek, then over his eye. McCree looked up at Hanzo as Hanzo stared back down at him nonplussed, with one eye shining gold.

The train righted itself, the lamp went back to plumb, and the vines shadowed Hanzo’s face again.

McCree breathed again, and turned back to the table, gently dipping his hands and their mittful of dirt and roots and sprouting leaves into clay pot, then packing a little more dirt  around it from a sack under the table. Hanzo didn’t move, didn’t speak, just went on looking like the graceful subject of a Utagawa woodcut.

Finally, the silence got to McCree. The silence, and the bewildering but perfectly welcome lack of violence.

"Exploring Adamant? Find anything interesting?" McCree hoped he didn’t sound as tired as he felt.

"A lack of things," Hanzo answered, sounding about as tired as McCree. "I passed through a storage car. It was practically empty."

"Sure," McCree packed the dark soil down gently around the little bully of a flower. "You got a question in there, or you just making a remark?"

"There's nothing on this train but people and what they need to live," Hanzo sounded irritated, but possibly more from confusion than anything he’d actually seen.

Or not seen, as the case was.

"That's not even a question," McCree pointed out, unhooking a watering can from under the table and soaking the sprout in its new home.

"Where the hell did you put your stock, McCree?" Hanzo finally asked, as blunt as McCree should have expected.

"See now, that's a question." McCree sat up, looking at the sprout without really seeing it. Everything in this car needed something from him. The plants just needed water and sunshine, the dirt to be turned over with fertilizer every now and again. Hanzo was a little more work. "It's gone. Almost all of it."

Hanzo paused, apparently trying to assimilate that information with what he already knew. Something, somewhere, in the mental processes jammed.

"Gone?"

McCree kept on staring at the sprout. He intentionally threw away the labels the flower sellers gave him with the seeds. He liked to be surprised by what came up when it bloomed. He wanted to know what this one would be though. A puddle of water filled the dish under the pot, and McCree nodded to himself and pulled a little basket from the the jumbled heap in the box nailed over the table. A quick shake identified what part was harness and what part was cradle, and he sorted it more or less out before spreading it out on the tabletop in front of him.

Hanzo simmered quietly in his periphery, waiting him out.

McCree picked his next words carefully, wondered what kind of impact they would have. Wondered who would be more surprised to hear them. He hadn't spoken them aloud before, not to Reeha, not to himself.

“I'm ending Deadlock."

Hanzo leaned against one of the planter boxes, stunned to flat silence and holding the edge with one hand.

"Yeah, I feel the same." McCree kept his eye on the flower, picked the pot and its new cradle up, and tugged the lines of the harness until the flower pot in it’s cradle hung upright. He was working without his gloves on, and only noticed it when the low light of the lamps gleamed dully over the scuffed metal of his left wrist. The joints of his fingers and thumb were dark with ground soil.

Hanzo stared at him. "You're ending Deadlock?"

"Sure am." McCree hooked a thumb into the loop of the harness, tipping his head to check the lines around the baby flower. "Reeha's doing most of the work anyway. Selling off the last of stock and getting rid of anything and everything we can. Congratulations."

"I don't understand."

McCree stood, moving slowly because the bruise on his jaw and his aching ribs had taught him that Hanzo could move fast and mean when he chose to. McCree didn't know how much more of that he could take. He hung the baby flower in its new pot from the rack bolted to the ceiling. He'd hung a few more little seedlings recently, and the rack was filling up with hanging cradles at different heights, the plants at different stages of growth and overgrowth.

"Take a seat, Hanzo," McCree said, once the flower was swinging in time with its new neighbors. He dropped back onto his stool. The woodstove behind him was warm, and the teapot on the billy plate was hot. "Tea?"

There was a bench tucked under the table opposite of McCree, Hanzo found it and drew it out with studied calculation, settling himself comfortably before looking back up at McCree.

"Tea?" McCree asked again, because it was easier to busy himself with tin mugs than try and hold eye contact with Hanzo right now.

"Explain," Hanzo said quietly.

He had a way of sitting with his feet shoulder width apart and his hands on his knees. He looked straight at McCree without a shred of hesitation.

"Black tea," McCree rubbed his eyes, he was being ornery for no other reason than dread and exhaustion. "Originated in China, grown and—"

Hanzo shot him a look that made McCree hold up his dirty hands in supplication.

"I can't run it anymore. I don't need what I wanted out of it anymore. I'm getting too goddamn tired to keep it up the way it needs to be. The people who depended on it don't anymore. You're convinced you wouldn't have found me and I don't think you would have. I made this whole set up to be hard to trace. But you were still something I had to maneuver around, and you're not the only one hunting me. I’m just… I’m tired, Hanzo. I’m so damn tired of it.”

McCree suddenly felt exhausted. Not just in need of a good sleep; his bones felt tired, he could practically feel them grating against his muscles, at his joints. When had he slept last? In a proper bed with a real mattress under him and a blanket? Not just curled up under an old horse blanket at the train station office and taking turns to stand watch with Reeha and the four spotters he'd kept with him. He had been tired even before he set up camp at the train station. Before he’d realized Blackwatch might be a valuable asset.

"I'm tired," McCree sat with his back against the edge of the work table, staring at the glitter of fire he could see through the vents of the stove. "I'm tired and sore and I had a goal in mind, and now that I'm close to it, it seems pointless. I never started this gang for the money."

"Why then?" Hanzo was still watching him.

McCree wondered briefly if Hanzo was holding himself up with that strict posture, hands on his knees, back straight. He looked like he was held up by a scaffolding of pride and practice. He looked like someone who didn't know what to do when he wasn't being driven by necessity. McCree felt a stab of fellow feeling. He wondered what he looked like to Hanzo, if he was held up by a scaffold of anything, or if Hanzo thought he looked broken, and just too used to standing to fall.

"Needed..." McCree absently rubbed his right hand over his left forearm. Right on the inside, the soft skin that had been mostly hairless. It was hard steel now, under the folded up flannel of his shirt. "I needed a place to go, I guess."

"What happened when you left Blackwatch?" The question should have been expected, but it was enough of a surprise that McCree's hand clenched over his left arm.

"I left," he said, his voice unsteady. Very suddenly, he was way out on a frozen lake of memories and had just heard the ice creak. He could feel his feet slipping under him. "Reyes made a mistake when he offered me the place. I was young and stupid, but that didn't mean I was suitable for the life he offered. I was..."

Hanzo sat quietly, immovable; he looked more like a general than Reyes did. Though honestly, Hanzo looked like he’d take a chance Reyes would shy away from—an imprudent general maybe, but a powerful one.

"Why did you stay with him?"

It came out without conscious input from McCree. He hadn't even been thinking about it and then, suddenly, he heard his voice asking the question.

The lamps swung overhead in the silence that followed. Adamant's gallop wasn't audible this far back along the train, but the noise of the wheels on the steel of the rails was a comfort. McCree reflected he hadn't slept well off of Adamant for years. The train was more a home to him than any other place ever had been.

"I stayed where my brother would be safe," Hanzo finally said, sounding like he was feeling his way into the words. "Relatively." He frowned.

"Relatively? Working as an assassin and spy was safer than the alternative?" McCree tipped his head a little to one side. The stove was warm on his left, beautiful dry heat washing over him. To keep his hands occupied, he sat up a little and reached for a mug.

"You met the alternative in Westport Junction," Hanzo said, gaze directed at the floor between their feet. There wasn't much space between them. Barely the width of the door on the back wall, just beside them. "Genji's been safer with Blackwatch, safe enough."

McCree poured tea, offered the mug to Hanzo before he remembered Hanzo would probably find that insulting too, and was surprised when Hanzo accepted it after a beat of hesitation. Presumably a beat of hesitation when they both wondered what the hell McCree was doing.

"Reyes thought you were dead or gone," Hanzo said. He gave a stiff, but also a polite nod of thanks. He held the hot tin cup delicately in both hands, using the tips of his fingers like the cheap tin was good china. "My story is more straightforward, and you've given me no cause to suspect you don't already know it. Tell me yours."

"I was seventeen and working for Deadlock," McCree said. He poured himself a cup for himself and stared into the steam rising from the dark surface. "It's half apple cider by the way."

That essential deviation from whatever Hanzo might have been expecting brought McCree up out of his frozen lake of memories. Anything to prolong the time before he had to cross.

"Black tea and apple cider."

"I can smell it," Hanzo said, impatience showing in the darker scowl. “Go on.”

"I—" McCree took a breath, blew into his cup and slid one step into a time he didn't think of anymore. "I was a kid in Deadlock. Brought up in it, then Reyes came, broke the gang into pieces, took almost everyone. A couple dozen grunt workers got away, but I didn't. I wasn't the youngest they took in, I don't know why... I still don't know why Reyes singled me out. I think I was the only one they asked, I didn't ask him if he tried to recruit anyone else. I just said yes."

He paused, took a sip, tried to let it warm him. Hanzo was looking into his mug with an expression of perplexed suspicion.

"What do you call this?" Hanzo asked.

"Brambish," McCree answered. "Sometimes it's apple cider, sometimes it's lemon, sometimes it's oranges. Depends on where we've been. The cooks seem to suspect we'll all come down with scurvy if we don't have it."

"It's good." Hanzo sounded like he didn't believe what he was saying.

"There's always more," McCree took another sip. "Big still of it over the stove in the galley. Help yourself whenever you want."

"Then?"

"Then you drink it."

Hanzo lowered his cup with a ferocity that would have made it thunder if he'd been able to slam it on a table. As it was he rested his wrists on his knees with the mug held in his fingertips.

"I joined Blackwatch," McCree shrugged. He hid his smile from Hanzo's exasperation until he remembered he wasn't wearing a hat. He smoothed his expression a little too late. "I joined under Reyes and Jack Morrison and Ana Amari. They were the trifectorate leaders of Overwatch, and they trained me. Gave me some new equipment and let me keep some of my own. Put me out on missions and listened to what I had to say, asked for my opinion and my input. I was..."

Way out on McCree’s frozen lake of memories, he heard the ice creak again.

The plants swayed around him, the leaves faintly glowed in the low lamp light. The snap pea blooms looked star bright in the dim golden glow, their edges crisp and bright. The heat on his side from the stove and the draft of cold air on his head from the cracked window behind him. His hands were slightly itchy from drying dirt. He brushed them off, one at a time, cradling his brambish, anchoring himself here, now, on Adamant.

Hanzo was quiet, watching him without his scowl.

"Deadlock didn't get cleaned out. But every single leader was dead or in prison, and that meant whoever was left rushed to the top. Except they weren't what you'd call the greatest of tactical thinkers. They'd been grunts in the Deadlock I'd grown up in, guards and muscle and folk we put by the doors to hold them shut when someone with a battering ram was lining up a charge on the other side. Now they were running Deadlock."

"Reyes didn't know?" Hanzo found that hard to believe.

McCree shrugged. "They weren't left with much, and they were stupid, and slow. It took them awhile to get around to looking for the remains of the gang that Reyes had gotten. I was alone when they found me. "

That little visited frozen lake of his memories under him, creaking ice and unsure footing and something moved in the yawning darkness under McCree's boots. Something under the cracking ice, huge and hungry and watching him, waiting for him to fall, to remember.

McCree looked at Hanzo, lost his nerve and looked down into his brambish and took another sip.

"I stayed for a few months after Deadlock had their talk with me. Overwatch had an engineer who worked on me. I worked with their doctor, too; they’re the one who’s going to be joining us in an hour or so actually." McCree scratched the back of his head. "I left. I told Reyes I was leaving and he fought me on it, damn near killed me himself. Never thought I'd leave, or maybe, never thought I'd tell him I was going."

Hanzo had finished his brambish; he licked his lips, and hung the mug from both thumbs, his hands held together. He waited patiently for McCree to go on.

He was almost across this frozen lake now.

"I told him exactly what I was going to do," McCree said quietly. "I guess I wanted him to appreciate my damn genius, or else, tell me I was wrong, I could do it better. He didn't, though, he just..."

The ice broke under him and McCree was suddenly drowning in memories he'd locked away for so long. He'd worked to keep these things away from him, worked hard not to ever, ever think of Reyes the day McCree told him he was leaving, setting up Deadlock again, going to make it right.

His hands tightened on his mug and there was a white hot agony slicing down the skin of his left arm. He forced his breath out. He tried to force the memories away, tried to force back the chill of his own old memories. He didn't want to relive the day Deadlock found him. Didn’t want to relive the moment Reyes’ face fell when McCree told him he was going. His commander and friend looking at him, desperate and anguished, talking in rapid Spanish because he couldn't be bothered to translate to English over something this important. Reyes, who’d saved McCree, who McCree looked at like a father, wasn’t even mad, he was simply heartbroken.

"When I left, I went head on against the current leader of Deadlock, and took it over." McCree held out his hand to Hanzo, and after a beat, Hanzo passed him his mug. McCree refilled both mugs, handed Hanzo’s back, and went on. "I killed a few of the ones that were left, drove out a few more, went and found some that had already left. I recruited more people and then I began building."

McCree shrugged. It didn't seem like all that much now. The bones of the supply and distribution were already in place when he took the gang over. Like a scrawny dog with it’s ribs showing. It had been a matter of feeding it up and sharpening its teeth and growing out its claws, then aiming Deadlock into the throat of the criminal market. It had been easy, in one way, to take control.

The train had been a good distraction from that, though, the train had kept him going. He'd called it Adamant because of that: his rock in the sea to wash up onto when the price of being an international weapons dealer got too high and he floundered.

The fire cracked in its stove. The leaves of the young ivy above him swayed, dappling the light from the lamps in pale green shadow. Hanzo sat with his tea in both hands, frowning in thought. He either didn’t notice, or didn’t care that McCree was studying him.

He looked at least as tired as McCree felt, at least as sore and world weary. He looked homeless in a way that went deeper than a physical need for shelter. He looked like a ship drifting out to deep water, unmoored and unmanned while a storm threatened.

"Why do Shimada assassins want you dead so badly?" McCree asked. The silence had stretched until it had felt almost comfortable. The heat of the fire and the warmth of the brambish and the plants swaying above them were all quiet reminders that at least here, on this train at this time, there was nothing to do but let things take their course. There was a comfort in that. Inevitability can be rewarding when you know you can't do anymore to help it along.

Hanzo glanced up. Again, his eyes caught some shard of unshadowed light from the lamps, and one brown eye glowed gold in the dimness.

Then he shifted, or the movement of the train cast a shadow over him again and he looked down and frowned. McCree breathed out again. Hanzo seemed thoughtlessly unperturbed and unrepentant about his appearance, how he spoke and carried himself. McCree didn’t feel like his superior, and that made it easier to be around him, and harder.

“The Shimada clan lost its lord and master almost fifteen years ago," Hanzo said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words. "A successor was chosen, one of his sons, and the elders of the clan set the young lord the task of forcing Genji, a lesser heir to the clan, to be less of a disgrace to the family. At the time, Genji led a life of few rules and a great deal of wealth, and he was… wild."

Hanzo trailed off and frowned. He cradled his mug in both hands now, like the warmth of the brambish alone could warm him.

He was crossing his own frozen lake, McCree could see it. Hanzo had the same unhappy wealth of memories McCree needed to keep down. McCree bit his tongue on the revelation that Genji was a lost Shimada clan lord.

"The new lord of the Shimada clan was aware he was heir to an ancient lineage, centuries of accumulated expectations and wealth and responsibilities. To prove himself, all he had to do was make Genji behave like the good vassal the elders wanted."

McCree didn't make a sound. He'd noticed that Hanzo's hands were shaking, very slightly.

"The lord talked to Genji, made him promise to act like he cared what the others thought of him, made him promise that he'd play a role. For a few months, that was enough, but the council of elders found out. They gave their young lord an ultimatum. He would have to force Genji to obey their commands, or kill him."

"Seems drastic," McCree murmured, not sure if that was the right thing to say. Unsure if there _was_ a right thing to say.

Hanzo nodded, however, so apparently McCree wasn’t that wrong.

"The Shimada are a criminal organization that go back centuries. You know how gangs think. There's not much of a difference between old and young. I kidnapped Genji," he said with a bluntness that made the statement blasé. "Wild things die in cages. I stole him from the clan, and they were stunned. It had never occurred to them that he would simply leave their control, or that I take some of the greatest treasures of the Shimada clan. I ran to Reyes. He sheltered us, trained us, made us lieutenants, and we accepted anything he asked of us, with the condition we could use some of our time to destroy the Shimada."

Adamant was crossing Ivy Gone Bridge, a long span of old steel and wire that creaked in the wind. McCree usually held his breath then they went over it, even though his engineers assured him the bridge had a few decades left it in. He hoped they were right, since the river under them was sixty feet down and almost as deep.

"You saved your brother's life," McCree remarked on the most salient point he could think of.

Hanzo flinched. It was such an unexpected gesture that McCree was certain Hanzo hadn't managed to stop himself. It looked like he was trying to cover for some injury, looked like he was ducking away from a blow he'd taken once before. Hanzo must be exhausted to be making a weakness like that so visible. Though to be fair, McCree found it hard to look at Hanzo, the same way it was hard to look into a bright light.

McCree stood as Hanzo abruptly organized himself back to immovable calm. Politely, McCree turned away and began moving down the beds to look in among the plants on either side. He reached in between a flourishing basil, a marigold and a blueberry bush and towards the windows, prime sunshine area, and began a small informal harvest.

"The Shimada want Genji dead," Hanzo said, while McCree was still foraging, both arms buried in garden. "Now they know where he’s been, know where to find him, they'll kill him."

"Not you?" McCree came up out of the plants and raked a few leaves out of his hair. "You're his brother, you're part of the clan, aren't you?"

"They have no use for me dead," Hanzo said with finality. He seemed to be picking his words again. “I only have value to them alive. Genji has none. He’s only valuable to them once he’s dead and their honour is satisfied.”

McCree came back silently, his right hand was full and he held it out between them, cupped palm held up. He bit into one of the strawberries he’d collected, and pulled the stem from his teeth.

"If anything," Hanzo was looking at the small, gem-bright strawberries in McCree's hand like he'd never seen them, “they may try to recruit me. I'll decline, it won't matter. It's Genji they're hunting."

There was a silence that filled the car. McCree hadn’t know what to expect from Hanzo, but this wasn’t it.

"We tried raspberry canes," McCree said, taking another strawberry and talking almost at random, "Strawberries and cloudberries hardly need anything to grow, and blueberries can grow on damn near rock. They're good."

Wordlessly, looking baffled, Hanzo took a strawberry.

Hanzo was good at hiding his expressions; the habitual scowl did a lot to deter closer investigation anyway. He wasn't as good about controlling his body language. He'd clench his hands, reach for his bow to check it was still on his back, his right hand would close around his left bicep like he needed to shelter it from harm. He tended to favour his right side, keeping his left shoulder a little back, tilting his head to the left like he'd rather take a blow to the head then the arm.

"Did you almost kill me just now on the platform?"

McCree was watching Hanzo when he asked. Watching and waiting and he had no idea how Hanzo would answer him.

Hanzo's movements slowed, didn't look away, or try to stand, or start to lie, he just tipped his left shoulder back a little, the same brief, unconscious gesture that could have meant anything, and brought a strawberry to his lips.

"Yes," Hanzo said quietly. He bit the fruit from the stem, his brown eyes glassy and a little unfocused.

McCree hadn’t actually been expecting an answer. It took him a moment to follow it up with, "Why?"

"Force of habit? I didn't kill you."

"Almost counts for something."

"You think so?"

"Well now, apparently, I almost died. I say it does."

Hanzo took another strawberry. They were small, nearly bursting out from between their seeds, intensely sweet and almost jaw-achingly flavourful. McCree had been growing them for years; they were his favorite. He’d planted cloudberries for Reeha. He wondered what Hanzo would have preferred.

"You want me dead so badly?" McCree asked, his voice low, as he watched Hanzo slowly eating strawberries, watched the man Reyes had replaced him with consider his limited options.

"Yes," Hanzo replied after another pause.

"Damn," McCree's fingers twitched around his offering, good training saving them from becoming a handful of pulp. The shock of unexpected frustration that shot through him felt jagged with something he couldn't identify. "Damn, you're not a dishonest man, are you, Hanzo?"

"I have no need to lie," Hanzo said with a touch of the haughtiness McCree had seen earlier. "I didn't kill you. I..." He stopped, fingers poised.

He held a strawberry in one hand, the other at his mouth, wiping the edge of his lower lip with his thumb. He paused, his thumb poised on his lip, and stared up the car through the jungle of plants.

"I was still thinking like someone who's hunting you," Hanzo finished, speaking more slowly, and finished wiping the corner of his mouth.

McCree watched him, watched Hanzo's thumb sliding across the edge of his lip, red with strawberry juice and looked at the floor between them. There were only a few strawberries left he noticed, and took one.

"You're payin' me to get you out of hot water, Hanzo. You still thinkin like that now?"

"No," Hanzo said shortly. "If getting out of town was all I needed I would have packed my brother in a grocer crate and had him shipped in a garbage truck. I need you to hide us."

"Sure," McCree held his left hand out to Hanzo, only a few strawberries left, his appetite had vanished. "Just consider me more useful alive than dead, will you?"

Hanzo cupped a hand and McCree tipped the last of the strawberries into it.

"We're nearly in Timberwolf. All goes well, we can pick up the good doctor and you and your brother can get patched up." McCree dusted his hands off one more time and went to stand.

"McCree."

He looked up at Hanzo, who he expected to see picking through the strawberries or casting them aside. In the time it took McCree to look up, he wondered if Hanzo was one of those fussy people who refused to allow people to hand things to them.

Hanzo was looking right at him though, cradling the last of the tiny, star-bright strawberries in both hands. He looked straight into McCree's eyes and for a moment, McCree ducked his head, then remembered he didn't have his hat, and had nowhere to hide his face.

"What will you do, once you shut down Deadlock?"

Not the question he was expecting, although anything from Hanzo was unexpected, and so McCree should probably stop trying.

"Put Adamant on a loop over a few scenic acres, build a house and make a garden and keep a couple of horses in the barn. Start an orchard. Plant honeysuckle on some south facing wall just for the pleasure of cursing how much it's grown every month." The words came out easily, though he knew it would never happen. Criminals don't get easy endings as much as they like to believe they could. "Doubt if I'm young enough for Reyes to try his luck with a stray like me again, even if he had somewhere to put me."

"I grew up in a village on the mountainside," Hanzo said. And immediately the confused expression on his face showed he hadn't meant to say that. McCree held his breath and hoped he'd go on. "There's cherry trees—not just gardens of them, everywhere. I left it in the spring time, when they were in bloom. I would like to go back to something like that."

"Glad to hear I'm not the only sentimentalist then," McCree said.

"It would have been a mistake to kill you," Hanzo said.

The words sounded so awkward in his mouth that it took McCree a minute to recognize the apology. His mouth opened slightly, and then shut again.

"You fought well against the Shimada clan," Hanzo said. He played with the last few strawberries, then selected one, and hesitated before biting in. "Have you fought them before?"

"Yeah," McCree settled back on his stool once Hanzo had started talking again. And realized he was unconsciously mimicking Hanzo's pose, feet slightly apart, hands on his knees. He shoved both hands through his hair to ease whatever uncertainty he was feeling in his gut. "Not often. They were uh... nearly demolished entirely over a decade ago and consolidated what power they could around Hanamura, didn't trouble me much. I never bought or sold to or from them, if that's what you're asking."

Hanzo shrugged, shaking his head as he ate the last three strawberries in quick succession. McCree cracked the stove door, and tipped his head at it, and Hanzo tossed the stems inside.

"They're good," he said, like he couldn't believe it.

"There's more. I wasn't kidding about what cookie thinks about the risk of scurvy on this train. We can buy groceries when we're in towns that will take a train like Adamant for a few days but mostly, we can run on our own. Helps with the low profile. You got a favorite?"

Hanzo looked at him, the flat inexpression that wasn't quite a scowl. McCree tried to find a last shred of grit to get him through this night.

"I know you hate me, Hanzo. I know you want me dead, but you're on my damn train and we’re both stuck with that. You want to fight me each and every day that's your business. I'm here to tell you, I got no quarrel with you. Don't have to be friends, just trying to be civil." McCree spoke quietly, gaze resting on a cluster of bright green cherry tomatoes to Hanzo's right. Frustration ached in his throat. He did this to himself, he knew it. He'd made this mess, forced it on Hanzo and what else could he have expected?

He turned away, a little more brusquely than he needed to. He knew he had set his own expectations so much higher than they realistically could be. He went for his hat. He wanted, very badly, to have somewhere to hide his face.

"Strawberries," Hanzo said.

McCree's back was to Hanzo and for a second, his movement hitched.

"Let me see your hand?"

That got McCree to turn around. "What?"

"Your hand." This time it wasn’t a question, demands came easily to Hanzo.

McCree went to hold out his right hand, and Hanzo shook his head. After a beat of hesitation, he pulled his left hand out from where he kept it tucked at his side, and offered it, palm up, to Hanzo.

Still dirty, from potting the baby flower. McCree felt like this moment was oddly out of place from himself.  They were almost to Timberwolf Station, the taste of summer strawberries still sweet and clean in his mouth. He had work to do, surely.

Hanzo took his hand, and drew it a little closer to him.

McCree swallowed.

It was a good prosthetic, one that Torbjorn had laboured over for some time, and it was something McCree cherished, despite what it had cost him. It looked shabby in Hanzo's hands though, worn in a way the rest of him felt. He'd been running for so long, he was beginning to realize how much he must have left behind when he went.

Hanzo hooked his thumb into McCree's fingers to open his hand, tipped his head and ran an eye up over McCree's wrist.

"Can this hand feel?"

"Yeah." McCree had never managed to put into words what the prosthetic inputs were like. He'd been working on them with Torb and Angela when he'd left Blackwatch, taking his arm with him. "But it's different. I can't feel pain if it's damaged, but I know that it is."

Hanzo nodded, turned his hand over and held it, McCree's fingers resting, loosely curled, over the edge of Hanzo's fingers. Hanzo's other hand cupped gently under his wrist. He studied the knuckles, scratched and scuffed and undented, despite McCree's efforts, and looked down the length of the arm to where it disappeared into the folded flannel of McCree's shirt.

"It seems dexterous."

"Yeah." McCree's mouth was dry; he didn't know if he wanted to pull his hand back or... not.

"Must have taken time?"

"Of course, it was..." McCree stopped, looked up and Hanzo was looking straight back at him. He blinked back. "Why the interest?"

"Where does it end?"

"Tips of the fingers," McCree said, impossible not to be just a little surly, then he touched his bicep with the fingers of his right hand before Hanzo could glare at him. “Here."

Hanzo cupped McCree's wrist and the base of his palm in his hand, then paused and glanced up for permission.

"I don't wish to be rude."

It sounded like another apology. Buried deep, and maybe McCree was imagining it, but maybe he wasn't. The car was warm and gold and green around them, a tiny hidden garden so far from the rest of Adamant’s work. McCree nodded.

Hanzo touched his arm, felt skin under his fingertips and traced down McCree's bicep until they caught on metal. McCree couldn't stop his fingers twitching, and Hanzo drew back a little, frowning.

"Does it hurt?"

"No," McCree clenched his hand and felt the tension move smoothly from his bicep to the mechanical crank of the prosthetic. If he didn't think about it, it felt like muscle, but it wasn't. "Just strange, to be reminded."

"I didn't mean to trouble you."

McCree shook his head again. "I don't mind." He was surprised to discover that was perfectly honest. "Why the interest?

Hanzo was still cupping McCree's wrist. Held the heavy prosthetic lightly, with polite gentleness that made McCree uncertain if anyone had ever been gentle with his left arm. He certainly hadn't.

"It's been on my mind," Hanzo said. He spoke so quietly, and he was looking down at the back of Mccree's hand again.

 

He trailed off with his breath hitching, just barely. But McCree noticed. He was noticing a lot about Hanzo, not just because watching Hanzo was turning out to be unexpectedly rewarding in a number of ways.

McCree opened his mouth, shut it again, and tried to shift his gaze from Hanzo's face. It felt unfair to look at him while he was so clearly looking down, his attention far away. They were sitting together in the dim cabin, so close their knees almost touched, and Hanzo was holding McCree's hand like it was made of porcelain the thickness of eggshell. Gold light and leaf-shaped shadows trailed over Hanzo's hair, over the buzzed short sides of his head, the light caught on the piercing at the bridge of his nose. McCree had made it his business to study Hanzo, learn as much as he could about the hunter stalking after him, but it hadn't been enough. Hanzo was much more than McCree could have expected.

In the sleepy, warm quiet of the garden car, still smelling like fresh strawberries and turned earth and wood smoke, McCree was beginning to suspect there wouldn't be enough time to study Hanzo.

"It's not as bad as I expected it would be, for what it's worth," McCree said after a while. He didn't want to break this moment, didn't want to break this unspoken agreement, whatever it was. Didn't want Hanzo to let go of his hand.

"Losing your arm or gaining the prosthetic?"

Ice under his boots again, dark shape of memory huge and hungry was circling under him. "Both were terrible, not going to lie. But the prosthetic itself? It's good, better than I would have believed. I know the doc'll set Genji up right; she's a miracle worker whatever she chooses to say. But whatever's on your mind Hanzo, it's not as bad as the reality.”

Hanzo looked up, and glanced down again, apparently surprised to find McCree looking at him.

"Hanzo, listen," McCree started, the words were ready on his tongue. It would be so easy to tell Hanzo exactly how much to hate McCree. He'd know exactly what Hanzo thought of him if he just went on.

"Listen," McCree looked straight back at Hanzo and tried again. Tried to ignore the touch of archer's hands on his wrist, at his bicep. "I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but it would mean a lot to me if you didn't try and kill me again."

Hanzo blinked at him, then abruptly ducked his head, almost managing to cover for a smile that tipped the corners of his lips and eyes up.

"I mean it," McCree said, talking through his self-loathing and disappointment in his own cowardice. This was not what he needed to say. "Follow your own heart and all but I tend to like getting along with the people I spend time with and it would be a shame if we couldn't come to some sort of mutual state of..."

McCree's gift for idiot rambling deserted him.

"Respect?" Hanzo supplied wryly.

With a studied, slow movement, Hanzo eased his grip on McCree's arm, and drew back until he was sitting upright again. McCree pulled his hand back, aware that Hanzo's fingers were shaking, just a little.

"Sure, that's better then where I was going. I was gonna say something like contentment, good company, I'm not sure."

"Good company?" Hanzo shook his head, sitting up a little straighter. "I'm not accustomed nor interested in being good company. Try another mutual state."

McCree laughed, feeling stupid and shy and half drunk from exhaustion and his own cowardice. "I think you’re fine company, Hanzo. I'd be happy to know you better."

The second after he said it, he knew he'd made a mistake. Something behind Hanzo's eyes slammed shut, his mouth opened slightly and McCree had never before seen someone rifling through their internal vocabulary of their second language more rapidly than Hanzo was. Because clearly, the incomprehensibility of what McCree had just said was the fault of language, not McCree being so brazenly, disrespectfully, belligerently rude.

"Apologies," McCree said, ducking his head under his hat brim as he shoved it down over his hair and feeling more frustration ache in his throat. He was so bad, so,so bad at this and that was only what he deserved.  All he deserved. "Been a while since I spoke to anyone that wasn't a subordinate or Reeha. I was too forward."

Hanzo’s eyes were still dark and somehow vacant, his mind still struggling to perceive the slight of McCree's overfamiliarity. Hanzo could have killed him an hour ago. McCree was being an idiot all over again.

"We're just about in Timberwolf," McCree remarked, standing and checking that his plants were secure in their cradles. "Reeha'll greet the doctor. She won't want to see me. I'm sure she'll have plenty to say to Reyes, though." He took his mug with him when he stepped past Hanzo to the door of the car.

"We're going on to side cuts after Timberwolf, and then we’ll have long runs without stopping for a while, but if you're amenable, I'd like to see that Blackwatch data tomorrow. Send a spotter to find me if you'd be willing." Ludicrously, his hands moving on autopilot through his embarrassment, while Hanzo was frozen in immobile fury, McCree tipped his hat at the door. "G'night, Hanzo."

He slid the door shut on Hanzo, his garden, the warmth and golden light, and shuddered in the cold of the rushing train, out under the dark sky. He lingered for a moment to wake himself up, before pushing on to the next car, and trying to assure himself that this situation  was real, and he had to deal with it.

Adamant was running deeper into the canyon of pines. It was all darkness outside the windows with rare flashes of sky through them, the swish of a branch on the roof of the car or along a window. Rarely, the pale yellow glow of the lamps shone out on the branches, picking out the texture of bark or needles on the branches. McCree breathed deep as he crossed from the garden car to the last car in the line, cold air moving fast, smelling like rain and pine and the faint reek of burning diesel. It felt good to be underway again.

His own cabin was a closely ordered mess, the bunk, the only bed onboard that wasn’t walled in as a box, heaped with covers and blankets and a few sheep skins he'd picked up along the way. He left it for now, lingering only for a moment in uncertainty, his eyes itchy with exhaustion and fatigue. His jaw ached, his ribs were bruised, and he felt more battered inside than out. He crossed the car, pulled a bottle from under his work bench and then swung himself up the narrow, steep steps to the cupola and the old brakeman's seat. He dropped into it, windows all around him, warm with his stove just below him to one side.

"Hell," McCree whispered to himself.

It was quiet in his car, well away from the workshop car, the galley, the engine. No one bothered him here, no one had been inside this car but him in years. He unscrewed the bottle, flicked the cap away, and drank. He came up for air staring out the window ahead of him, at the line of cars jolting and jerking away in a orderly smooth rush that belied how much power was being used to keep it going. What light there was showed him just the edges of the train cars, the canyon of trees on either side of him, the sky between the trees when they were on a straight course. He could make out the stars sometimes through the trees and clouds. Adamant was pulling like a champion ahead of him, a dark dragon of a machine he loved more than himself.

McCree shut his eyes to drink again. He let his left leg dangle down the ladder stairs, his right propped against the side of the cupola wall, cold through the wood. The heat of the bourbon filled him all the way down, left him boneless. He sat back, head propped heavily on the old seat back, bracing the bottle against the brakeman's console with one hand.

McCree kept still, dozing in the chair, head and shoulders above the line of the car roofs, feeling like he was keeping some kind of vigil, problems and questions and all the many, many things he'd couldn't handle spinning through his mind. There was so much he couldn't cope with if something went wrong. So many ways all of this could end bad and bloody. It was already going bad in some ways. He hadn't expected Hanzo to be anything like he was, hadn't expected Hanzo to encrypt the data McCree wanted in order to force McCree to take him on on Hanzo's terms as much as McCree’s.

Hadn't expected Hanzo to leave McCree feeling gutted. McCree hadn't found himself tongue-tied in years. Hadn't had someone throw him against a wall since before Reyes had taken him in. Hadn’t had to deal with that much back talk, that much anger, from anyone since he'd become the leader of Deadlock. Hadn't had anyone physically pick him up to move him since he’d reached his current height. He had no idea how to deal with Hanzo.

But it was more troubling to know he wanted to.

He didn't move when the trees thinned a little, a few clearings began to appear on either side of them, overgrown and fallow, but the train stopped at the next station, and McCree put his head back and drank bourbon until he thought he could breathe fire if he really put his mind to it.

He didn't go to see the doctor when she boarded Adamant. He didn't explain her to Hanzo or that outspoken brother of his, and he didn't want to know what she wanted from Reyes.

McCree cranked the brakeman's seat around until he looked out the aft windows when Adamant started up again, picking up speed to run for the off cut. He watched the sky behind them, turning ink black and indistinct with rain, as it chased him down the rails.

"Hell," McCree whispered again.

He'd planned for this. Two years since he'd looked behind him and found Hanzo patiently following in his tracks. It had been more than a year since Reeha had asked him for help. More than a year since McCree had been looking and looking and found nothing.Then six weeks ago he realized why he and Reeha would never find what they were after. In a few hours and suddenly everything would begin happening at once. It was already starting.

He had worked hard to get to today. He had worked hard to get everything here.

He didn't think it would happen, really. He didn't think he could get them all here.

McCree shut his eyes and finished the bottle and heard the rain spatter across the roof of the cupola. The storm had caught up to him again.

He had gotten everything right, and now he knew he wasn't ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Next update will be up super soon, since this weekend is my birthday and so I'll be busy and then heading out to go camping! If you're so inclined you can find me on [Tumblr](http://leoandlancer.tumblr.com)!!  
> Art for this chapter was made by the excellent [Archivist](http://hellomynameisandiam.tumblr.com/post/172328487238/mccree-opened-his-mouth-shut-it-again-and-tried)! Who was my partner for the Big Bang. =D  
> Also beta reading on this whole fic is by [Windlion](http://windlion.tumblr.com)! Who is a patient and stalwart friend who puts up with a lot of run on sentences and comma splices and I am so grateful to her.  
> Thank you again for reading. <3


	6. Plans Never Survive Contact with the Enemy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick update because I'll be out camping and following chapter might take a while to get up!

"I have several questions." 

The sound of his brother's voice, soft and patient and speaking Japanese woke Hanzo out of an uneasy doze. 

"This should be good." Hanzo grunted, discarding his English automatically. It took him a moment to find his voice; the taste of strawberries was in his mouth and at first he couldn't remember why. Then he sat up a little straighter and looked at his brother for a distraction. The cat was still curled up next to him, a small white loaf with her paws tucked under herself, eyes closed. She was still purring.

"Did you tell me everything?" 

"From when I arrived at the train station to when you arrived, yes," Hanzo replied, only slightly untruthfully. There were few things he kept from his brother, but all of them were for the sake of his own dignity. 

"Well. Then I certainly have questions." 

Hanzo liked Genji's Japanese. He would never tell his brother so; he didn't know if Genji noticed how differently he spoke all of his languages. They had both been taught English by tutors and linguists and an elocutionist who had intended for them to use the language as scions of an ancient and noble house. It was what they had spoken primarily for the last ten years; Genji's English was precise. He spoke Japanese like a boy though. Either by dodging or being looked over, Genji avoided most of the tutors who'd been assigned to Hanzo for the care of his native tongue, and as a result, he spoke like the other children he'd played with. Not much like a noble. 

"Why is his second-in-command former law enforcement? When I asked she told me she was former RCMP." 

Hanzo just grunted. 

"She was lying about that," Genji said matter of factly. "Or more to the point, if she was RCMP, she's more than that now." 

Hanzo thought about the way Reeha stood, the sidearm tucked into the shoulder holster under her arm, the massive rocket launcher she held with casual, well trained competence. He agreed, he had wondered about that himself, but stayed quiet. Genji was insufferable when he had any insight at all and Hanzo didn't like to encourage him, especially when there was absolutely no need. 

"There's scarring on her neck," Genji went on, exactly as Hanzo knew he would. "From armour, heavy armour, and most of the scarring was going the wrong way." 

Hanzo hadn't noticed any scars, but he'd been focused on McCree, and of course Genji noticed everything. "What do you mean the wrong way?" 

"I'm so glad you asked," Genji said, without changing his lecturer's inflection. "The scarring went up." 

"You said the armour was heavy, and heavy going up?" 

"Yes." 

Hanzo grunted again. Reeha had struck him as competent, smart, and well trained. That was all he'd cared about.

"She's not loyal to Deadlock," Genji said after a beat. 

"That's not a question," Hanzo replied. 

"She's loyal to McCree," Genji said, ignoring him, "Not the gang. She slapped the back of McCree's head earlier, just before I met him. She gave him hell over something." 

"What, exactly?" Hanzo asked, despite knowing better. Genji loved gossip more than almost anyone Hanzo had ever encountered. Working as a spy was probably the best career Genji could have hoped for. 

"Didn't catch it. My Arabic isn't great, and McCree's isn't either, based on his reply. But he called her sister, so that's worth knowing." 

Hanzo kept quiet again. He thought of Reeha protecting Genji with a goddamn rocket launcher while Hanzo was outside wondering if he should kill McCree. Without thinking, Hanzo fixed the blankets around Genji, and Azizi put one enormous paw out to push against his hand. 

"So why is she here?" 

"You said he called her sister," Hanzo shrugged, he tried to take his hand back and Azizi introduced what felt like eight needle-hooked claws into his skin. Hanzo left his hand where it was. The claws retracted slightly.

"She's helping him commit some of the biggest crimes in the world," Genji replied flatly. "Biggest crimes in history if your research can be trusted, which I do, of course, implicitly. So sorry but I don't buy that sororal affection can explain that much. So why is she here?" 

"Are all your questions about the second in command?" 

"She doesn't fit, Hanzo. The train, the engineers, the crew, the ancient technology, the smuggling, the bed boxes, the paperwork--" 

Genji broke off as Hanzo sat up a little straighter. He let Azizi express herself through the medium of claws and pulled his hand back lightly scratched. "Go on," Hanzo said, uncurling his fists and deliberately sitting back for a moment. 

Genji was watching him with a tiny half smile. "He really would have had us with that, huh? You're pissed that he would have kept hidden if he hadn't stopped and hung out at that train station where you caught him up?" 

"Go on," Hanzo said. He did not sound as sullen as he really felt in Japanese. Unlike Genji, Hanzo did sound like a noble. His family had been paid a lot of money to ensure he could sit here and speak with calm detachment in moments of vitriolic fury. 

"I'm saying all these pieces fit, but not together. McCree fits with Reeha, but Reeha doesn't fit with the train. The train fits with the entire lack of technology, which fits with McCree, but doesn't fit with wanting Blackwatch's Archive, which is digital. McCree wants all these things, his sister, the train, the Archive, but nothing he wants fits with any of the other things he has. Am I talking to a wall or did you fall asleep again?"

"You're talking to wall," Hanzo said, as rudely as possible. He hadn't considered any of this. Then relented, a little. "Yet it's not all senseless." 

"How sweet of you to say. Look, Hanzo, all I'm saying is the people here are living an old life that burns diesel and hardwood. They've got square headed iron nails in the walls and use kerosene and candles for light and the only remotely modern thing about them is the weapons. Even if they need our data, they don't need it in a digital format." 

Hanzo stayed quiet. He hadn't noticed the nails, or what burned in the lamps. He'd noticed the guns. He'd noticed that McCree's second in command didn't look like the other people on this train. The spotters and engineers and drivers who, despite widely varying origins, skin colours, and nationalities, all looked like siblings somehow. They had the same tan lines, the same patterns of wrinkles and scars on their hands and arms. Reeha had none of those. Apparently she had scars on her neck, scars that had been worn in from constant use of armour that weighed a lot but went up instead of down. 

"We don't fit either," Genji summed up quietly. 

"I made an arrangement," Hanzo said. 

"So what's Reeha's arrangement?" 

Hanzo opened his mouth, but in that moment, Reyes sat forward out of the shadows and leaned his elbows on his knees. 

"It would be polite to make some noise when you do that," Hanzo said, barely managing to contain his start of surprise from sheer practice. Reyes was a shadow of a man when he wished to be. Hanzo had been staring idly into those shadows for the past twenty minutes and he hadn't noticed they contained his commander. 

"Or breathe," Genji sounded a little strained. He wasn't as used to Reyes' tricks, or was still waking up, and the flinch of shock as he'd reached for his swords had pulled something painful. 

"Her name's Fareeha Amari," Reyes said, low voice quiet in the dim cabin. The lamp swung very gently in its cage. "Her mother was a Captain in Morrison's Overwatch, twenty years ago. She's not a clue, Genji, she's a trained soldier, an engineer and, least important to her but not me, practically my god daughter." 

Hanzo checked his scrupulously maintained mental timeline. "She was a little girl when you broke Deadlock." 

"Yes. I was serving with her mother when Fareeha was a baby. I took in Jesse McCree when he was seventeen years old. I thought he'd make good in Blackwatch. I was wrong about that, but he and Fareeha were close," Reyes' eyes were far away and glassy with old pain. "I suspected she kept in touch with him," his voice was distant. "But I didn't want... I'm not surprised she's here, after all this time. 

"So what's her agreement with McCree?" Hanzo asked Reyes flat out. "Why is she here with him now?" 

Reyes shrugged smoothly, "A lot of organizations are being overhauled. International politics are changing, a lot of money is changing hands. She was working for a security operation in Egypt. Her deployment ended two years ago and there was no hope of another one. She needed a job, and a safe place to stay, and she had a brother who'd be happy to take her in." 

“I was hunting deadlock, and you had what you suspected a direct line to them?” Hanzo said, straining to be polite. “Odd, but you never mentioned that.” 

“Reeha is my god daughter,” Reyes said without shame. 

“I am your lieutenant, I was working under  _ your orders _ and you didn’t give me all the information you had…” Hanzo had to cut himself off. The anger in his chest was rising again and he was far too tired to make this anything but a fight. 

“Relations between her mother, Jack Morrison and I were a little complicated at the fall of Overwatch when I took Blackwatch under,” Reyes said with frozen calm. “Hanzo I gave you the task of hunting down a weapon’s dealer. I didn’t know they were Deadlock when I did so. Even when you found out, I did not tell you what I knew because, and I cannot stress this enough, I don’t know how much of my Overwatch era information is true, or useful, or remotely relevant. I didn’t want to drag Reeha in unless you turned up evidence she was involved. I needed you to hunt Deadlock with no prior knowledge getting in the way.” 

The lamp swung over their heads again. The ceiling was dark wood, slightly sooty and rough; sap had oozed and crystallized at the knots. The light didn't travel far, raw wood walls didn't lend themselves well to radiance. It was cozy and warm, but dim enough expressions were hard to make out. Hanzo sat quietly, delicately wondering how to piece together what Reyes was, and was not saying, from his little speech. 

"You know," Genji said conversationally, "we can tell when you're lying." 

Reyes grunted, irritation and impatience and a few more intonations that communicated a lot about how much Reyes wished Genji hadn't said that. Reyes had a rich oral lexicon of non-verbal communication and Hanzo was an expert. 

"Why the hell would you say that, Genji?" Reyes growled. 

"Some damn bastard trained me in information and intelligence. It was an oversight on his part but I, personally, am making the most of it," Genji said.

"Some poor goddamn dumb bastard is right." Reyes said shortly. "You're not in Blackwatch anymore. No one is. Happy?" 

"I manage," said Genji, looking like a suffering angel again as he tipped his head back and to one side. "Somehow." 

Hanzo narrowly resisted the base fraternal instinct to slam him with a pillow. He had something important to tell Reyes, and slapping Genji with a pillow had to wait.

"Reyes, McCree's shutting Deadlock down." 

Reyes was halfway to leaning back into the shadows behind the bench, and froze. Behind Hanzo, Genji squawked, disrupting the equilibrium of pain in his stomach and chest again.

"You  _ didn't  _ tell me everything, you were holding out on your only brother!" Genji wailed, only partly out of pain and mostly out of the opportunity to shred on Hanzo a little. 

"When the hell did he say this?" Reyes snarled. In the non verbal lexicon, this snarl ranked somewhere between shock masquerading as anger and delight displaying as urgency. 

"Shortly after I said you were a fuck up for making McCree what he is," Hanzo said, then as Reyes leaned forward again, mouth open, teeth showing in the shadows on his face, Hanzo talked over him. It was refreshing to be so belligerent. "And for asking me to find a bolt hole to hide us from the international press, the UN, your assassin, the Shimada Clan, and anyone who has ever had reason to blame us for anything in our lifetime because you couldn't." 

Reyes shut his mouth. 

Hanzo kept eye contact. "McCree says he's shutting things down, it's why the train's damn near empty. They’ve barely got enough for their last orders. Do you have any insight on that?" 

Reyes didn't answer, and Hanzo was suddenly reminded about McCree laughing, a little wryly, when Hanzo said he didn't question his commander much.  _ You're much more well suited to him.  _

"Reyes," Hanzo said, using his noble, princely voice for extra calm. “What happened when you recruited McCree?"

It was stupid to ask. It didn't matter now, and he had as many answers as he needed to assuage his own curiosity. Yet something about the way McCree forced the story out, such simple, short sentences rendering the, clean bones of a history that had meant a lot to him when he was living it, made Hanzo ask. He wanted answers from Reyes, any answers. 

"Ask him," Reyes went to lean back, then actually froze when Hanzo shot a glare at him.  

"I did. Now I'm asking you," Hanzo spoke quietly, and with a tone that made Genji go perfectly still behind him. "You're my commander, and you told me to get us out of trouble. I have. But, I am loathe to remind you, it's at the cost of being here, where your former second in command is running the largest black-market smuggling operation in the history of the world and I want you to tell me why he's doing this instead of acting as your lieutenant." 

Reyes actually flinched at the words. 

Hanzo stayed quiet and still and waited. 

The train rocked around them. They were still in deep forest, and the dim light in the cabin only served to show the shadows of their reflections in the glass. The only noises was the occasional swish of a branch on the roof, the roar of the engine away ahead of them, and Azizi purring.

"He was..." Reyes spoke quietly, not his usual growl, but softly, like a confession. Then stopped, mouth open to form the next words and holding perfectly still, halfway between leaning back against the wall and forward against his knees, a rare moment of Reyes in transition, neither in shadow or light. 

Hanzo waited. Behind him in the bed box, Genji was quiet, giving Reyes no reason to divert attention from Hanzo. 

"Jesse McCree was seventeen years old when I recruited him," Reyes spoke slowly, quietly, and the way he said it sounded like he was reading the information off a list or presentation in his head. The words sounded strange in his mouth, like he'd never had to put any around this daisy chain of memory. 

"He was smart,” Reyes went on. “Opportunistic. I couldn't interview him because he answered all my questions so perfectly I knew he knew what I wanted to hear. And he wanted me to know. He could have said just enough, could have shown fear or resignation or just a goddamn flash of self-preservation but he didn't. He just sat still and quiet and so damn angry I thought he'd choke on every breath he took. But he didn't. He just told me exactly what I wanted to hear, and nothing else." 

Hanzo could see it, somehow; the McCree he'd met, only younger and powerless and smart enough to know he could have done better if he'd been in charge. Maybe smart enough to have seen this coming, to prepare for that inevitable interview.

"Jack Morrison tried to interview him and the same thing happened. He spoke to us like he was the second part in a play. Like he was filling in the blanks on an exam he'd seen a few hundred times before. Then on the third day I walked into his interrogation room at eight am and I asked him if he wanted to join Blackwatch and train under Ana Amari, Jack Morrison and I." 

Hanzo's jaw clenched. He remembered when he'd been asked almost the same question. He wondered how many other strays Reyes had picked up over the years. 

"The kid didn't reply, but that was the first time he didn't answer a question. First time he didn't have an answer ready for us." Reyes shrugged. "He learned fast, worked hard. He liked it in Blackwatch, from what I could tell. He stayed for seven years. Then he left." 

Hanzo was taken aback by the abrupt end to that story, but the train shuddered and slowed and Hanzo had to shift his weight to balance where he sat.

"Well," Genji said, flat on his back and not worried at all about the train’s sudden deceleration. "Thank you for that concise and informative report on three days of your time with Deadlock’s current crime lord, and your brief summation of the following seven years of your time together. Very informative. Very useful." 

"Go to hell," Reyes said. He sat back abruptly, back in shadow. 

"No, no I mean it. I must tell you I'm trained in information and intelligence. I'm good at this shit. That was some quality information you just gave us," Genji retorted. 

"Why are we stopping?" Hanzo asked, laying the question out between his commander and his brother before this could get anymore insufferable. 

"I didn't train just one idiot in information and recon. You figure it out," Reyes thumped his head back against the wall and crossed his arms. "I'm out of easy answers." 

Hanzo spared him a glare, then glanced at Genji, who shrugged and barely nodded. He was fine. 

In the hallway past the sliding door to Genji's cabin, he found a spotter, just pushing the door from the next car up shut behind her. She blinked at Hanzo, and brightened. 

"Reeha sent me," the spotter said. "We're coming up to Timberwolf Station. The doctor's going to be joining us here." 

"Is there an infirmary on board? Somewhere Genji can go to..." Hanzo stopped as the spotter shook her head. She had dark brown hair in tight curls that made a halo around her head. She wore the ubiquitous course cotton one-piece cinched at the waist with a toolbelt and grease on her arms.  

"No infirmary. Doc'll treat your brother where he is. I guess Reeha said it would be better not to move him? After we pick her up, there'll be a hour or so while we get up on an offshoot, then out to a side cut. So we'll be starting and stopping a bit. But the side cut we built is safe." She tipped her head up proudly as she said it. "You got any questions before we stop? We're sending the doc here when she’s aboard." 

The train slowed suddenly, and both Hanzo and the spotter swayed on their feet, though neither of them were in danger of stumbling. 

"No," Hanzo shook his head, then added, slightly grudgingly, "thank you." 

The spotter nodded, turned without a salute of any kind and tugged the sliding door open. She had a sawed off shotgun tucked into her belt like a sword. 

Hanzo stared after the spotter, wondering just what kind of recruitment McCree managed, and thought of a doctor on this antique of a train. The mundane equipment they'd require, Genji's slow recovery if he made one at all. It would cost them time, so much goddamn time. And Genji would come out on the other side of it weak and in need of rehabilitation, recovery of his strength and skills. He'd need to be protected all that time, hidden away. For a hot moment of sheer panic, Hanzo could have killed Moira for leaving them.

The train kept slowing, and looking out the long windows, Hanzo could see a few bare patches through the trees: fields maybe, though they seemed far from anything for agriculture. Then he remembered the Omnic War and recognized a few of the skeletal towers that jutted above the trees like broken bones. Years ago, huge, soaring Omnics had been knocked out of the sky in a comet of clinging fire, and they died burning as they writhed and twisted and poisoned the surrounding land into uselessness. These scars would last another hundred years. The thought made Hanzo feel small, and he instantly turned to head back into Genji's cabin. The comfort of bullying his little brother was a luxury at times like these.

"We're picking up a doctor." Hanzo slid the door shut behind him. 

"There, you were right, two bright young lieutenants with information gathering abilities. You're a fine educator." Genji hadn't moved, just seemed to brace himself against the box edges as the train had slowed, and was easing himself out of that as the engine was reined down to a stop. Reyes had sat up again, ready in case Genji needed him. 

"We should have looked for Moira," Hanzo grunted. 

It had been a point of contention. Reyes had been dead set against going after their geneticist, part time magician, and fashion expert. Hanzo had been ready to go after Moira with his grudge and a hatchet. Genji had lain on the operating table with the back of one hand over his eyes, making delicate self-deprecating remarks to ease the tension,and abstained from commiting to either course of action. 

The train jerked as it came to a final stop, though their window just overlooked a black wall of trees. They could hear Reeha calling down and a clatter or someone climbing the steps up to the car.

"We do not have time to go to Iraq," Reyes spoke without looking at him, eyes steady on the door to the cabin where they could hear voices on the other side. Reeha, and another voice, bell like and laughing. 

"We should have made time and found her, or at least found out what happened to her," Hanzo snapped. "Genji needs healing." 

"I need healing," Genji agreed piteously. 

"Moira's fine," Reyes said, sounding exasperated. "If the entire world collapsed in a heap, Moira would be sitting on top making notes and planning the next one."

"Then why did she leave without..." Hanzo was perfectly on course to rehash this argument, ready to start up the old demands he'd already made before, when the door of Genji's cabin slid open with a snap and ended all discourse. 

A woman dressed in white with golden hair gleaming in the lamp light stepped in with her chin up and a long white staff in one hand. She was smiling pleasantly, though her gaze was cool and watchful.

Hanzo wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but he managed to shut his mouth and cover his astonishment after a moment. He couldn't quite stop himself from taking a step back. 

"Someone called for a doctor," the woman said. She had a gentle smile, and huge blue eyes, and Hanzo saw a pistol strapped under her arm when her coat swung open. 

Genji had craned around to get a look at the new arrival, and looked like he was ready to fall out his bed box. He had never been as good as Hanzo about covering his astonishment. 

"Mercy, this is Hanzo and Genji of Blackwatch. Reyes' lieutenants." Reeha was a full head taller than the woman, and stood in the doorway behind her, leaning on the door jamb like she had been looking forward to whatever was about to happen. "Hanzo, this is Doctor Angela Ziegler, codename Mercy." She smiled at him, and uttered a phrase he was becoming familiar with. "If you want to know more, ask Reyes." 

"Gabriel," the doctor looked at the mass of shadows on the corner bench. 

The gentle smile was gone and the expression that replaced it could have frozen ducks to a pond. It stopped Hanzo where he stood. He was intensely grateful, for the first time in his life, that he was not Gabriel Reyes. 

"Angela," Reyes' voice was strained and agonizingly polite. He looked like he'd been trying to back away through the wall behind him. Both his arms were out, pressed back against the walls as if looking for an opening. He had half risen off his seat, legs braced and back sliding up the wall. He looked more like a deer in headlights than a commander fit to lead heroes. 

Or even, a couple of insubordinate information gatherers, both of whom were enjoying this unexpected entertainment more than they could possibly have told. 

"Nice to meet you, Hanzo." The doctor turned away from Reyes and offered him a pretty, professional smile. Then she looked down at Genji, who looked a little like Reyes, frozen in the act of backing away for no reason any of them would have been able to articulate. "Genji, was it?" 

"Charmed," Genji managed.

Dr. Zeigler tutted, and then there was a bright white whirr as her staff flipped easily around her hand. Even in the small space of the cabin, the big staff never touched anything, and came to bear on Genji as the trisected head split open, and three panels began to spin. A golden light built up rapidly.  

Genji looked at the tip of the staff in fascinated horror. Hanzo opened his mouth to protest and heard the faint hush of Reyes trying to fade out through the cracks in the wall behind him. 

A trailing beam of gold light wove from the doctor’s staff to Genji who winced, then blinked, and sat up. He smiled after another moment, the tension dropping out of his shoulders. A halo of pale gold surrounded him. 

"Patching you up," Mercy said. She sounded kind, and smiled when Genji and Hanzo looked at her in honest gratitude. 

"Thank you," Genji smiled back, the honest, even smile he used when it didn't occur to him to put on his practiced smirks. "I'm fine," he reported to Hanzo, back to Japanese and patting himself down with obvious growing delight. 

"And you as well," Mercy said. training her staff on Hanzo. 

He'd forgotten the shuriken wounds; they'd already dried, scabbed over, and he hadn't thought of them since. He was used to them. But the warmth that spread through him came from his marrow outward, and pushed the dull pain away until he felt perfect again. 

"Thank you," Hanzo said, with a genuine sincerity that surprised him.  

"Her healing doesn't hurt at all." Genji was delighted. He'd pulled up his bloody shirt and was looking at his scarred, but smooth stomach. "She's better than Moira." 

"Ah," Mercy beamed, and then her expression didn't change, but it iced over as she turned towards Reyes, then her smile showed teeth. "A word about Moira, Gabriel?" 

Reyes slid another few inches up the wall as he attempted to push himself through it. His edges were frayed out and black. "Mercy," Reyes started, speaking slowly, then pausing to swallow hard enough Hanzo heard him. Hanzo had no idea if he was asking for mercy or simply addressing her. "About Moira..." 

Hanzo watched him with fascinated interest. Genji looked like he could kill for popcorn. He still had his shirt rucked up, apparently forgotten, and now had his chin on one fist, leaning around Hanzo to watch whatever was going to happen. Reeha was grinning from the doorway, and leaned down to pick up Azizi and held her so she got a good view too. 

"Yes," Mercy snapped her staff around her wrist again. A white blur of movement and then the staff was in her left hand, her right hand grasping the edge of her coat. Very close to the pistol strapped under her arm. "The thief that stole my research, Reyes. Where did you hide her from me?" 

Reyes opened his mouth, shut it again, and suddenly Hanzo knew exactly why Moira had abandoned them, her research, her laboratory, her house, test subjects, all her possessions, and run to the far side of the world.

 

* * *

 

 

 

The sunshine woke Hanzo. Sunshine, and shadows flashing over his face. Then the sun moved, tracked sideways until it was no longer shining into his eyes, and Hanzo blearily wondered how the hell the sun could move so fast. It moved back a moment later. 

Slowly, with shadows occasionally darting over the sunshine warming his face, Hanzo began working his way backwards through his memories. 

Gabriel Reyes trying to shove himself through a wall away from a woman in white and gold, half his size. Soft, broad woven cotton under his cheek, over his bare arm, the heavy warmth of wool over him. The sun moved again. McCree, the prosthetic arm, the car he'd walked into that felt like another world. Plants exploding out of wooden troughs of dark earth, vines hanging from the curved ceiling, McCree sitting on a little three legged stool cherishing an infant nicotiana. His bed turned, swayed under him as the train went over a dip in the tracks. Pulling an arrow to his cheek, snarling at himself to let go, to watch McCree fall with an arrow in his throat and end whatever this was. Hanzo felt a jolt of panic, enough to force his eyes open, thrusting that memory away as though it were a nightmare. 

Something moved at his side, and all recollections were put on hold while Hanzo focused on that first. 

Azizi the cat had rolled from an undignified sprawl, back to back with Hanzo, and onto her back, all four paws in the air. Hanzo spoiled this by rolling over to lie on his back as well, displacing Azizi and causing her to get up in a huff. 

Hanzo had not felt the least inclined to curb Mercy last evening as she tore into Reyes. Both Reeha and Genji were as happy as he was to watch. Eventually, Reyes' interrogation ended, Mercy had gone to her cabin with Reeha, Reyes had slunk off to his, and Genji had kicked Hanzo out. Azizi had followed Hanzo out, and sat and yelled at the shut door to Hanzo’s bed box until he’d cracked it to let the cat in.

The bed box was warm and pleasantly dim. It was not quite seven feet long and four feet high and three wide. He'd slept in capsule hotels before and found the small space reassuringly private, quiet, and somehow it felt nice to be unable to do nothing more than sleep in the little space. The door to the box was on a sliding panel, half the length of the bed, and carved with a rearing horse. Sunshine poured through the the gaps in the carving. 

Hanzo looked over at Azizi, standing stiffly with her back arched in a stretch. The cat relaxed, sat down and canted her head to one side to lick down herruff. Hanzo hadn’t had a pet before, but he could just about see the appeal. 

The train rocked again on the uneven rails, shadows continued to stream over the windows. Hanzo lay on his back under the warm, heavy wool blanket and the softer, worn cotton sheets and Azizi eventually climbed over Hanzo, each paw feeling like a slowly applied hammer blow, and curled up on Hanzo's stomach. 

For the first time in Hanzo's life, he'd woken up without anything to do. 

He had Genji to check on, his mind rushed to fill the void created by his current catastrophe. He had Reyes to talk to, McCree to deal with. He had the Archive to begin to unlock—it was part of his bargain. 

Hanzo shut his eyes and let Azizi and his wool blanket weigh him down. No one barged through the door, tried to kill him, broke through the window. The train rattled on and the cat purred and the sunshine flashed through the gaps in the carved bed box door. Hanzo lay drowsy and at loose ends with his own life, and Azizi purred with his eyes shut. 

Eventually, Hanzo pried himself out of his bed, unsure what he would do with this day but prepared to start. Genji was about two thirds into a bowl of oatmeal, two biscuits, and a mug of the cider-tea on the table in his cabin when Hanzo walked in. 

"Sleep well?" Genji hunched protectively over his food, without noticing; old habits died hard. 

"Surprisingly," Hanzo admitted. "Give me the Archive." 

Genji looked up. They were alone in his cabin, Reyes apparently still hiding from Mercy in his. "You sure?" 

"I made an arrangement," Hanzo said quietly.

Hanzo thought of aiming an arrow at McCree's throat while McCree looked for him, worried for him. Thought of McCree offering him a handful of tiny, perfect strawberries. Hanzo pushed his left shoulder back without meaning to and took one of Genji's biscuits from him. 

"Hanzo," Genji said patiently, watching the biscuit disappear bite by bite with narrowed eyes. "We had a plan to not  _ follow _ that arrangement." 

"You were right. Reeha doesn't fit with the train, just with McCree. We don't fit with either. I want to know why McCree agreed to take us on." He finished the biscuit and licked errant maple syrup from his hand. "I want to know why Deadlock’s being shut down when it’s such a huge success. I want to know what information he needs so badly." 

Genji studied Hanzo for another moment, then dropped his eyes and shoveled oatmeal into his mouth with the grace of a stoker shovelling coal. "Fine," Genji grunted, "But you have to tell me what you learn." 

Genji had kept his swords in his bed box, just as Hanzo had kept Stormbow in his. Genji unbound a little of the wrapping on the hilt of his katana in a particular, deviously unlearnable pattern to reveal a small recess, barely large enough to hold the the tiny drive. He tipped it into his hand, and passed it up to Hanzo. 

Hanzo eased the lashing on Stormbow’s grip. Under the binding, right where the hollow of his hand held tight, there was an identical recess, an almost identical drive. Wordlessly, Genji replaced the decoy drive in his sword, and Hanzo turned the archive over and over in his hand. It was the size of a coin, rounded like one, and marked with Blackwatch's insignia. An accumulation of Blackwatch's entire data banks, twenty years of information of all kinds. 

"Good luck," Genji remarked. He replaced the swords; he was always careful about them, even, or maybe especially, because Hanzo never thought he could be. 

"This could be a mistake," Hanzo said softly. 

Genji shrugged. "The worst thing that could happen has happened." 

Which wasn't untrue. "Have you seen McCree?" 

"He was having breakfast when I started wandering around looking for food. I didn't see him right away; he looks like all the rest of his people." 

Hanzo went hunting for McCree himself. It turned out to be easy enough to find him; he was standing in the war car, over one table spread out with papers, under the playing cards and coloured wool cats cradle. Hanzo paused in the door, with the sunshine coming in, the wool glowed with a halo of fuzz, and the cards, taped up in their pattern of organizations looked luminescent. McCree had both hands flat on the table, leaning forward to read something. 

McCree's head began turning to check the door before his eyes looked up from the paper, only just managing to tear his gaze away at the last minute. Then he cocked a smile at Hanzo, and stood up straight, tucking his thumbs behind his belt buckle. 

"Well, morning, Hanzo." 

He wasn't wearing the hat, and his brown hair was shining in the sunlight. Hanzo scowled back at him as he approached the table, and set the drive down over the papers McCree had been reading with a snap. 

"A gift," Hanzo said instead of good morning greetings. "For you." 

He was watching, waiting for McCree to realize what that was. He would have been watching McCree anyway, or would have wanted to, but the moment McCree's face went from polite interest, to confusion to understanding was informative. Hanzo felt himself tense slightly. 

"Good of you," McCree said. He touched the drive, picked it up like he couldn't believe it was real. His words sounded automatic. "Real nice." 

"You didn't think I'd bring it," Hanzo said flatly, bridling at this assumed lack of honour. Nevermind that it was accurate. 

"No," McCree said, honestly, and deflating some of Hanzo's irrational pride with his candor. "Unless it's a fake," he went on politely, further deflating Hanzo. 

"It's genuine," Hanzo was forced to admit. Then as McCree turned the drive over and over in his hands and watching a slow, genuine smile spreading over his face, he pushed on. "We agreed to give you a fake." 

That got McCree to look up, "Reyes know you're giving me the real deal?" 

"No. Reyes put me in charge of this arrangement." It hadn't occurred to Hanzo to talk to Reyes about this. As it turned out, Hanzo felt like they'd dodged a bullet by honouring his bargain with McCree. It served the dual advantage of surprising the hell out of McCree and giving Hanzo a little more insight. 

"He'll give you hell. Alright. You want to get into it?" McCree held it up, one eyebrow cocked. 

Hanzo shrugged, and watched McCree put the little drive down with a click on his papers again, and stand a little aside. 

Hanzo hesitated for another beat, then pressed the tip if his first finger to the passplate, and a holographic keyboard blinked into life under the drive. Hanzo typed in his authorization, typed in his passwords and disarmed the automatic triggers for data corruption and broadcasting a distress signal. He unlocked the archive, stage by stage, dismantling firewall and security measure and failsafe, one after the other, until the drive's dull, matte black skin turned as blue and iridescent as a hummingbird. The keyboard flickered, then brightened, and the air above the table flashed, then burst with light. Pictures and requisition requests and contents tables and timelines all spread out in an arc around him, curving in at left and right, curving over his head. 

"Shit," McCree said quietly he had one arm over his chest, the other fist tapped against his chin, he was looking up at the holograms of light, terabytes of information spreading out and up and around him, like wings of a giant bird. 

"How are your luddite sensibilities?" Hanzo asked, only a little spitefully. He reached out and touched the screen for the contents. All the words were scrambled, unreadable, the entire drive was encrypted as he said. He scrolled through the unreadable list. 

"Feel like the country mouse, thank you for asking," McCree said without rancor. Then very suddenly, "Damn." 

This because Hanzo stopped, only a little way down the vast list of contents, at the only legible name. Deadlock. 

Hanzo tapped it. The screens around them flickered, reorganized themselves, and suddenly there were hundreds of pages around them, a seraphim of information with innumerable wings filling the war car, outshining the sun. Two years of accumulated information, every scrap of data Hanzo had been able to attribute to Deadlock, everything Reyes had given him, and every word Genji had heard. For a time they stood there, Hanzo looking from page to useless page, and McCree stared around, turning in a circle, looking up and down at the information presented to him on all sides.

"Hell, Hanzo," McCree swore again, softer still, and stopped turning. His shoulder brushed Hanzo's, but he didn't seem to notice and Hanzo didn't move. "You weren't kidding about that two years." 

"No," Hanzo said. McCree was standing close to him, close enough the fabric of their shirts was touching. "I wasn't lying about this." 

"Alright," McCree reached out, drew a sheaf towards himself and read a Deadlock recipt from over twenty months ago, pulled in another page, and another, "Alright. I believe you. Now, I hope you got something more for me than my own achievements." 

The train ran on, out of the vastness of the forest and into highlands banded with pale granite and rivers and mixed trees. The scars of the dead omnics were here, too, gouged into the earth so that at times, the train ran on trestle bridges over the craters. Hanzo stayed with the archive, navigating the scrambled data until he could recover enough to enter in the first of sixteen keys. 

A chunk of the meaningless file names reorganized into legible words as they unlocked, and McCree starred in delight as the information became available. 

Hanzo spent the day like that, painstakingly locating three more inputs and entering three more keys into the Archive, and McCree stayed beside him. They ate lunch sitting side by side on the table, their back to the window, tin plates in hand, bright wings of information spread before them. 

Hanzo kept with the Archive, and didn’t move when McCree’s research left him close enough to touch. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed, I'm posting this in a hurry before I head out to my birthday party dinner! Have a great Thanksgiving my fellow Canadians! Please come say hey on my [Tumblr](http://leoandlancer.tumblr.com) if you're so inclined <3

**Author's Note:**

> This will be updated through the day, as I still editing this monster because my life is in shambles but I'm really proud of it. Thank you for reading.  
> EDIT: Surprise I will be editing it more five months later.


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